I come from a tradition that reaches back to Marx and the dialectics of culture and technology. This lineage travels through critical theory and what I would now call southwestern marxism, whose signal thinker is Gramsci. Subsequently I was influenced by the Budapest School and Castoriadis. As part of this path, I founded Thesis Eleven, the journal of international social theory, in 1980, and continue to support it today at a distance, having retired from direct editing after forty years. I joined Curtin in 2015, developing the South African connection with visitors like Ivan Vladislavic and Noelene Murray, Dorothy Driver and JM Coetzee. From 2018 I took up a chair at Sichuan University, working with the team of Fu Qilin. Hitherto I worked in cultural and historical sociology at La Trobe. I am best known for my work on maverick critical thinkers such as Bernard Smith and Zygmunt Bauman, and on the history of socialism, modernity and the history of ideas more generally. I have published 30 books and 200 papers, as well as much journalism and reviewing. My most recent books, 2022, are The Work of History, edited with Sian Supski, and Circling Marx and Intimacy in Postmodern Times, both 2020. I have three books in press, Chain-Toward the Blues; and The Photographs of Zygmunt Bauman, edited with Janet Wolff, along with an edited collection, Alastair Davidson – Gramsci in Australia.
About Peter
BA, Dip. Ed. (Rusden), PhD (Monash)
After completing teacher training I worked with Alastair Davidson at Monash, completing a PhD on Trotskyism in 1983. I fell into the company of sociologists, many of whom were historians at the Phillip Institute in 1983. In 1987 I took up a postdoctoral fellowship at The University of Melbourne with Stuart Macintyre. In 1988 I took up the position vacated by Agnes Heller at La Trobe in 1988, rising from lecturer to personal chair in 1999. In 1999-2000 I acted as Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard, returning to Harvard in 2002 to act as William Dean Howells Fellow in American Literature 1880-1920. I am currently affiliated with the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study; the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology; with the Bauman Institute at Leeds, and am Professor Emeritus at La Trobe. Over these years I actively encouraged cultural traffic across the Atlantic and across the south, with special reference to Aotearoa/New Zealand, South Africa, Delhi and Manila, in my work as Director of the Thesis Eleven Centre 2002-2014 and as editor, or curator of the journal Thesis Eleven. I am engaged in ongoing collaborative work with Sian Supski, and with Fu Qilin in Chengdu.
