Professor Peter Buse

• Crescent House 121
• T: 0161 295 4764
• E: p.buse1@salford.ac.uk
• SEEK: Research profile

Semester 2, 2012-13

Monday 1400-1500

Tuesday 1300-1500

I did my first degree at the University of Alberta in Canada, spending an exchange year at the University of Leeds. My MA and PhD are from the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at the University of Wales, Cardiff. I am currently Director of English in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences. In my research I am especially interested in questions of culture and technology, particularly as they relate to the history and theory of photography, and in the role of popular photography periodicals in the shaping of photographic cultures. This work ties in closely with my work with the Periodicals research cluster, a research grouping which I lead.  In 2007 I received grants from the AHRC and the British Academy to work on a cultural history of Polaroid, a project which is gradually turning into a book. I have also published a number of pieces engaging in one way or another with psychoanalysis. Collaboration with others has led me to write on Walter Benjamin and on the Spanish filmmaker Alex de la Iglesia

I currently contribute to the following modules-

Cinema and Psychoanalysis

Critical Approaches to Film 2

Introduction to Drama

Issues in Adaptation 1

Theory, Text, Writing

History of photography and photography theory, with special reference to Polaroid, popular photography and photography magazines.

Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis; Walter Benjamin; critical and cultural theory.

Modern European cinema; comedy, genre cinema.

Modern British Drama

MA, University of Cardiff (1992)

PhD, University of Cardiff (1996)

Executive Member, European Society for Periodical Research

Member, Society for the History of Technology

Member, Media, Communications, and Cultural Studies Association

Books

• ·Ed. (with Andrew Stott), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999)
• ·Drama + theory: Critical approaches to modern British drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001) 
• (25%) With Ken Hirschkop, Scott McCracken and Bertrand Taithe, Benjamin’s Arcades: an unGuided tour. (Manchester University Press, 2005) 
• (33%) With Nuria-Triana Toribio and Andrew Willis, The Cinema of Álex de la Iglesia (Manchester UP, 2007).

Recent journal articles

• ‘Polaroid after digital: Technology, Cultural Form, and the social practices of snapshot photography,’ Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24:2 (2010): 215-230.
• ‘The Polaroid image as photo-object,’ in Journal of Visual Culture 9:2 (2010): 1-19.
• ‘It was better not to know,’ Radical Philosophy 163 (Sept/Oct 2010): 59-60.
• ‘Polaroid, Aperture, and Ansel Adams: rethinking the industry-aesthetic divide’, History of Photography 33: 4 (2009): 357-73.
• ‘Surely Fades Away: Polaroid photography and the contradictions of cultural value’, Photographies 1:2 (2008): 221-38.
• ‘Technical Properties’, Études britanniques contemporaines 35 (2008) : 3-14.
• ‘Photography Degree Zero: Cultural history of the Polaroid Image’, New Formations 62 (2007): 29-44.
• ‘Tel Quel in Manhattan’, in Nottingham French Studies 44:3 (Autumn, 2005): 69-82.
• (75%) With Nuria Triana Toribio and Andrew Willis, ‘Este no es un juego, es Acción Mutante: The Provocations of Álex de la Iglesia’, Tesserae: Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 10: 1 (2004): 9-22.
• (25%) With Nuria Triana Toribio and Andrew Willis, ‘A “Popular” Spanish Auteur: Alex de la Iglesia as a Polemical Tool’, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 2: 3 (2004): 139-48

Recent book sections

• ‘40,000 roses, or, the perversity of Polaroid’ in The Polaroid Years, ed. Mary-Kay Lombino (New York: Prestel, 2013), 32-53.
•  ‘Sollicitations téléphoniques: La Campagne de Martin Crimp’ in Le théâtre anglais contemporain (1985-2005), ed. Elisabeth Angel-Perez and Nicole Boireau (Paris: Klincksieck, 2007)