Peter Sachs Collopy

I’m a historian of science and technology and a doctoral candidate in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. My dissertation research concerns video as a technology that provoked Americans and Canadians to think in new ways about politics and consciousness in the years around 1970. I follow portable video recorders and the feedback discourse that accompanied them across the fields of psychiatry, education, political activism, and artistic and documentary video production. My work thus brings the histories of cybernetics and the human sciences together with those of media and the New Left, focusing particularly on the fertile synthesis of technological utopianism and participatory democracy.

My other research interests include the histories of personal computing, theistic evolutionism, anthropological race concepts, and alternative education movements. I blog at Historical Present.