Peter Soppelsa | University of Oklahoma (original) (raw)

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Papers by Peter Soppelsa

University of Pittsburgh Press eBooks, Nov 22, 2022

Technology and Culture, 2015

Technology and Culture, 2013

French Politics, Culture & Society, 2013

Two recent studies of French waterways-sociologist Chandra Mukerji's Impossible Engineering and h... more Two recent studies of French waterways-sociologist Chandra Mukerji's Impossible Engineering and historian Sara Pritchard's Confluence-tell stories of humans modifying nature and nature pushing back. For these authors, because water is both socially constructed and an independent actor in human history, it can either buoy or sink the power of states and nations. Both authors build innovative interdisciplinary methods with techniques from environmental studies, science and technology studies, the sociology of knowledge, and geography. These methods, which Mukerji calls "posthumanist" and Pritchard calls "envirotechnical," are based on a concept that theorists like Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway have called "nature-culture" or "naturecultures," while environmental historians and geographers speak of "hybrids" of nature and culture. 1 Mukerji and Pritchard bring these hybrids to bear on central questions in the cultural and political history of modern France. This essay situates these books with respect to the emerging interdisciplinary field of water history in order to reflect on what French history and water history can offer one another. In the decade since the International Water History Association (IWHA) was founded (2001), the wave of new research looks like a ten-year flood. Recent landmarks include several significant edited volumes in the global environmental history of water between 2006 and 2010, and the 2009 launch of the journal Water History. 2 The intervening years have also seen significant work on water among historians of technology, a scholarly community in which Mukerji and Pritchard play prominent roles.

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2017

Journal of Historical Geography, 2016

My chapter from Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? explores Baron Haussmann&am... more My chapter from Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? explores Baron Haussmann's haunting influence and legacy over urban thinking, planning, and culture between 1870 and 1914.

Dix-Neuf

ABSTRACT This essay comments on the articles collected for this special issue about international... more ABSTRACT This essay comments on the articles collected for this special issue about international expositions in France. It finds four major themes for new directions in exposition studies. First is the long literary and cultural shadow of expositions, or the shifting timescales that gave these temporary events lasting legacies. Second are the (often unintended) concrete consequences and costs for host cities of expositions understood as mega-events and mega-projects. Third is the inverse or obverse of ‘display’, those things that expositions conceal or hide. Fourth are the ways that expositions shaped and were shaped by the world beyond their gates.

The Journal of Modern History

Trends in ecology & evolution, 2017

This paper describes a process of 'open' interdisciplinary scholarship. Researchers from ... more This paper describes a process of 'open' interdisciplinary scholarship. Researchers from across the University of Oklahoma blogged about a recent paper by ecologist Erle Ellis, and met in person to discuss posts. They then hosted Ellis for a seminar on questions that emerged, and for a public panel discussion.

Transfers, 2014

By tracking railway language through periodicals and poetry, this article examines the words and ... more By tracking railway language through periodicals and poetry, this article examines the words and images used to make sense of Paris's new subway and streetcars between 1870 and 1914. It proposes a new threefold approach to understanding the appropriation of technology, which reworks its agents, sites, and chronologies. It maintains that appropriation takes both material and symbolic forms, and that appropriation processes transform both appropriated objects and their cultural contexts. Language anchors appropriation as it operates through circulating texts. For Paris, railways were both transportation technologies and versatile tools for making meaning. Railways set spaces, customs, identities, and images adrift, which traditionalists found threatening, progressives found promising, and avant-gardists found inspiring. Fitting Paris with railways required both reimagining and rebuilding the city, and reshaping what railways could be. The article concludes that appropriation is ne...

Humans, Animals, Environments, 2011

Horses were the quintessential animals of nineteenth-century Western cities. In this chapter, the... more Horses were the quintessential animals of nineteenth-century Western cities. In this chapter, the author discusses why that was no longer true in the twentieth century. Horses were the most ubiquitous, everyday and useful of urban animals. As the main motors for industrialising cities, horses saturated the streetscape, helping cities to operate and helping to define the urban. Social and economic historians have long recognised horses as urban infrastructure in nineteenth-century Europe powering machines; transporting people, goods and information; completing supply chains; and driving the urban economy making the horse market a major economic sector. Study of horse answers a deeper question, how were horses constructed as a technology. The author's analysis builds on Feenberg's theory of the instrumentalisation of technology. The chapter historicises the instrumentalisation process and adds empirical substance to instrumentalisation theory. Keywords: Feenberg's theory; Horse; instrumentalisation theory; nineteenth-century Paris

Trains, Culture, and Mobility: Riding the Rails, 2011

The Paris Metro was discussed and debated long before the rail network was a reality, and many sc... more The Paris Metro was discussed and debated long before the rail network was a reality, and many scholars have puzzled over why Paris did not develop urban railways sooner. The earliest plans for the Metro come from the 1840s to 1850s; Paris developed horse-drawn ...

French Historical Studies, 2013

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

This essay develops an analytic term coined elsewhere: "the fragility of modernity." 1 ... more This essay develops an analytic term coined elsewhere: "the fragility of modernity." 1 The term indicates the special fragility of urban modernity, what historians of technology call "the networked city." Modern urban life increasingly depends on complex heterogeneous systems that combine social organization, technological artifacts, and natural resources in delicate assemblages, recalling Graham's and Marvin's recent and sonorous term "splintered urbanism." Simply put, networked infrastructures are delicate, and because modern urban life has come to depend on them so vitally, this fragility not only compromises subways or water pipes, but also destabilizes urban modernity more broadly—socially and spatially, materially and symbolically. 2