Returning from a long flight from Knoxville, Tennessee to Sydney on October 11 and arriving in Sydney in the early hours of October 13, it was with great sadness that I received the news that Peter Thomas had died in London aged 53. My inbox started flooding with the report that the cause was a suspected heart attack and my sincerest condolences and deepest sorrow remain with Sara Farris and their two children.
If all my recollected dates are correct, I first met Peter in 2006 at the Rethinking Marxism Conference and we continued that contact across numerous platforms ever since over the following twenty years. These included, of course, invitations at the University of Nottingham; appearances at the annual Historical Materialism Conferences; collaborations at Socialist Workers Party platforms organised by Neil Davidson; International Gramsci Society conferences in Cagliari, Sardinia; panels at the British International Studies Association; and, not least, a workshop organised with Elizabeth Humphrys and Ihab Shalbak in 2015 hosted at the University of Sydney. The latter was themed on questions of method in Antonio Gramsci, anchored around Peter’s involvement as a plenary speaker. Plans were afoot to invite Sara and the family to Sydney for another workshop in 2022 but fell through due to logistical issues.
Peter Thomas delivering his plenary address at the workshop “On ‘Heroic Fury’ and questions of method in Antonio Gramsci”, University of Sydney, May 2015
The end of the first decade of the new millennium and the period ever since can be quite simply identified for those in Gramsci Studies as “The Peter Thomas Moment”. His scholarship trailed a blaze in this conjuncture led by his discipline-defining book The Gramscian Moment published in 2009 and then succeeded by numerous books, articles, and conference contributions right up to the present. The latter included a Gramsci conference organised in Sardinia by the International Gramsci Society just two weeks ago.
The Gramscian Moment was awarded the Premio Internazionale Giuseppe Sormani of the Fondazione Istituto piemontese Antonio Gramsci, for the best study on the thought of Antonio Gramsci published between 2007-2011 in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish. This pivotal book furthered a notion of moment to indicate a contemporaneity between Gramsci’s epoch and our present to advance the development of Marxism as a philosophy of praxis. Back in 2014, the Past & Present Reading Group set as its first text with great excitement The Gramscian Moment, which we completed with this commentary. It is for that reason that those heady days marked by the publication of The Gramscian Moment can be rightly acknowledged also as The Peter Thomas Moment, one that will endure with a sense of permanency in Gramsci Studies.
I will miss Peter’s towering intellectual presence, his softly spoken mentoring, and the historic evenings we had together.
Your voice and originality changed our field for the better. Rest in power, Peter Thomas.
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