Peter Oviatt

Peter Oviatt

Peter is a PhD candidate in MIT’s program in History; Anthropology; and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS). He holds a master’s degree from the Department of Politics at the New School for Social Research. His research concerns agricultural applications surrounding the mycorrhizal association, an underground symbiosis between fungi and plants. Peter uses a qualitative, ethnographic approach to investigate the industries built upon recent advances in mycorrhizal science. These industries strive to re-introduce mycorrhizae as a key factor in agricultural systems, examples include mycorrhizal inoculants used as biofertilizers, silviculture practices designed to nurture common mycorrhizal networks, and lab-based techniques to cultivate edible mycorrhizal fungi, such as truffles. With tools from the discipline of Science, Technology and Society (STS), and training in Environmental History, Peter asks how the emerging science of mycorrhiza, and the discipline of plant-microbe interactions more generally, signals at once a return to pre-industrial forms of agriculture and a refined and sustainable version of today’s chemical-based and mechanized systems. In this pursuit, Peter collaborates with mycologists and agronomists, having co-authored articles with researchers at INRA, France’s National Institute for Agricultural Research.