I am a historian, archivist, and curator of American science, technology, and media.
I study histories of video, computing, evolution, human sciences, visual culture, technologies of consciousness, and Caltech, where I work as University Archivist and Head of Archives and Special Collections.
My research project “The Revolution Will Be Videotaped” explores how artists, psychotherapists, political organizers, and “video freaks” used video—and discourses of feedback and panpsychism which accompanied it—to experiment with mind and society in the 1960s and 1970s. I have published on video art therapy, video and psychedelics, self-observation, electronic photography, and video synthesizers.
I have also written about racist and antiracist physical anthropology and theistic evolutionism. I coedited Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020, maintain a history of cybernetics bibliography, and serve as a managing editor and web administrator of the History of Anthropology Review.
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.
they/he
peter@collopy.net