Peter D. Thomas

Peter D. Thomas was born in 1973 and grew up in a suburb of Brisbane, Queensland. He studied English literature and critical theory at the University of Queensland, taking a BA (Hons) and an MA (Research). There he first encountered Gramsci's Prison Notebooks through his teacher Daniel O'Neill. In 2000 he moved to Europe for a PhD at the University of Amsterdam, supervised by Marcel van der Linden and Michael R. Kratke, awarded in 2008. He also studied and worked at Freie Universitat Berlin, L'Universita Federico II in Naples, the University of Vienna, the University of Helsinki, the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, and as a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Thomas's doctoral work, which began as a critique of Perry Anderson's and Louis Althusser's readings of Gramsci, became The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Brill, 2009; Haymarket paperback, 2011; South Asian edition Aakar Books, 2013). The book won the Premio Internazionale Giuseppe Sormani of the Fondazione Istituto piemontese Antonio Gramsci. It combined Italian philology after Valentino Gerratana's critical edition with a non-dogmatic revolutionary-Marxist reading, insisting on the integral state, hegemony as pedagogical and experimental practice, and Gramsci's philosophy of praxis.

He joined Brunel University London in 2010 as a lecturer in the history of political thought, later becoming professor and, from 2021 until February 2026, head of the department of social sciences. As head of department he was praised for diversifying staff, lowering walls between disciplines, and putting student and junior-faculty welfare first. He left the role after winning a Leverhulme Trust fellowship on the contexts and consequences of translating hegemony in Italian and German thought.

Beyond the two monographs he co-authored Mapping Communication and Media Research with Juha Koivisto (2010), co-edited Encountering Althusser (2012), In Marx's Laboratory (2013) and The Government of Time (2017), and published widely on the modern prince, passive and permanent revolution, subalternity and translatability. He translated works from Italian and German, including books by Antonio Negri, Massimiliano Tomba and Roberto Finelli, and contributed entries to Das Historisch-kritische Worterbuch des Marxismus and the Dizionario gramsciano.

Thomas settled in North London with his partner Sara R. Farris, a sociologist and fellow Marxist scholar with whom he co-edited Encountering Althusser, and their daughters Mira and Nadia. Friends remembered him as a generous mentor, a warm conversationalist after lectures and conferences, a woodworker who built bookshelves and cat-proof fencing, and a cook who welcomed guests. He served on the Brunel University and College Union branch committee and took part in the 2018 UCU pensions strike. He was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Higher Education Academy.

On 11 October 2026 Thomas suffered a heart attack while running near his North London home. He had just turned 53. Historical Materialism announced his death on 13 October, and obituaries followed from Brunel colleagues, rs21, Counterfire, Progress in Political Economy and Jacobin Italia. No further medical details were published. Tributes stressed both his scholarship and his care for students and junior staff.

The Gramscian Moment remains a standard reference in Gramsci studies and has been or is being translated into Turkish, Spanish, Greek, Arabic and Mandarin. Radical Politics extended that method into twenty-first-century movement strategy. Through Historical Materialism's journal, conferences and book series, Thomas helped build one of the main international networks of scholarly Marxist debate. Colleagues have pledged to honour him by continuing that work without dogmatism, and by returning to his writings on hegemony, organisation and emancipation.