Peter Soppelsa

(Travel Fellow, 2018-19)

Peter Soppelsa

Travel Fellow

The World War on Rats

Peter Soppelsa holds a PhD in history from the University of Michigan and is currently an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science and managing editor of Technology and Culture at the University of Oklahoma. His research sits at the intersection of urban, environmental, and technological history with currents in sociology and geography. He has written for journals in the history of technology, environmental studies, French studies, and mobility studies.

His current book project, The Fragility of Urban Modernity, is under review at the University of Minnesota Press. It examines conflicts over infrastructure in Paris after Haussmann as responses to the complexity and fragility of networked systems that are hybrid, both sociotechnical and envirotechnical. It tracks cultural and political conflicts over urban infrastructures and the construction of urban modernity.

His new research project examines the “Global War on Rats” during the third bubonic plague pandemic of 1894-1959.