Professor Peter Buse

Personal Statement

I joined Liverpool as Dean of the School of the Arts in September 2018. From 2013-18 I worked at Kingston University, serving in that time in a number of posts: Head of School of Performance and Screen Studies, Associate Dean for Research, Arts and Social Sciences, and interim PVC for Research, Business and Innovation. I was formerly Head of English, Drama, and Creative Writing and Professor of Visual Culture at the University of Salford, and before that (long before) completed my MA and PhD at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University and my undergraduate studies at the University of Leeds and the University of Alberta, Canada.

I've published and taught widely in the fields of critical and cultural theory, modern drama, and film and photography studies, with work appearing in major journals of cultural theory and visual culture such as Angelaki, Continuum, Cultural Critique, Genre, History of Photography, Journal of Visual Culture, New Formations, Parallax, photographies, and Textual Practice. I am author or co-author of five books, the most recent of which is The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), a media archaeology of instant photography. The research for this book was funded by the AHRC, the British Academy, and the Leverhulme Trust, and has led to public engagement with, for example, the British Film Institute, the Photographers' Gallery, and Polaroid Originals. My current research interests include psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan), comedy, periodicals (journals, magazines), and mass and vernacular photography. I'm a founding Member of the European Society for Periodical Research and its Vice-Chair and an invited member of the Todi (Italy) Circle of Photography. I sit on the editorial boards of New Formations, the Journal of European Periodical Studies, and the Historic England imprint for the University of Liverpool Press.