Peter Sachs Collopy

I’m a historian, archivist, and curator of American science, technology, and media.

My research project “The Revolution Will Be Videotaped” explores how artists, psychotherapists, political organizers, and “video freaks” used videotape recording—and discourses of feedback and panpsychism which accompanied it—to experiment with mind and society in the 1960s and 1970s. I have published on theories of self-observation, video synthesizers, electronic photography, and Catholicism in video art.

In the history of biology and the human sciences, I have written about white supremacy and its opponents in physical anthropology, theistic evolutionism, and the quantification of sex. I maintain a bibliography of the history of cybernetics.

I am University Archivist and department head at the Caltech Archives and Special Collections. In that role, I lead a team that facilitates understanding of Caltech’s role in the history of science and technology by curating research collections and public exhibitions, currently including Becoming Caltech: Building a Research Community, 1910–1930 and Gone But Not Forgotten. I am the principal investigator of Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020, a PST ART: Art & Science Collide research, exhibition, and publishing project. I am currently on leave from Caltech while I recover from a bicycling injury.

As a managing editor and web administrator of the History of Anthropology Review, I foster an intellectual community of historians and anthropologists. I also serve on committees of the Society for the History of Technology; Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine; and Oberlin College OSCAlums.

In 2022, I cotaught Curating Art and Science at Claremont Graduate University. From 2015 to 2017, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern California, where I also taught America in the Cold War World and The Evolution Debates. Before that, I studied and taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Oberlin College, was an organizer and board member of Mariposa Food Co-op and the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association, and worked as a web developer and science museum educator.