Peter Andersson
Position: Senior Lecturer School/office: School of Humanities, Education and Social SciencesEmail: peter.andersson@oru.se
Phone: +46 19 302438
Room: F3149

About Peter Andersson
Peter K. Andersson is a Senior Lecturer in History, with an expertise in popular culture, everyday life and streetlife, mainly during the late 19th century.
Research
Andersson's research has primarily dealt with urban culture in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and history from below focusing on everyday life, social interaction, and deviant worldviews. His first monograph, Streetlife in Late Victorian London: The Constable and the Crowd (2013) offered a street-level perspective on the behavioural norms and nonverbal subcultures of the Victorian era. In Silent History: Body Language and Nonverbal Identity, 1860-1914 (2018), he developed this perspective by studying body language as a means of acquiring knowledge about the identifications and self-conceptions among ordinary men and women in Western urban culture more broadly.
Andersson has also published several scholarly articles on topics including 19th-century walking-stick usage, rural Swedish eccentrics, English and Swedish dandy cultures, marginal worldviews, and microhistorical methodology. As a writer of popular books of history, he has provided a history of the comedian from Renaissance fools to late modern standup comedians, and a personal essay on café culture.
He has recently shifted focus, from the nineteenth century to the sixteenth, with a project on early modern fools and clowns in England, funded by the Swedish Research Council.
Teaching
Andersson is currently teaching on courses of Modern History, Fact and Fiction, and the essay courses. He has previously taught courses on Urban History, Contemporary History, Early Modern History, Fashion History, and Historical Ethics.
Research projects
Active projects
Research teams
Publications
Articles in journals
- Andersson, P. K. (2023). A Danish Fool at Elsinore? Some Thoughts on Hamlet's Lost Clown. Critical Survey, 35 (4), 10-25.
- Andersson, P. K. (2022). “A Simple Honest Dunce”: Humphrey King and the Unlearned Poet in Late-Elizabethan Literary Culture. Early modern literary studies, 22 (2).
- Andersson, P. K. (2022). The Clown That Went Out of Fashion. History Today, 72 (6), 62-69.
- Andersson, P. K. (2022). The Imperturbable Seriousness of the Circus Buffoon: The Shakespearean Clown on the Threshold of Modern Comedy. Journal of Victorian Culture, 27 (4), 595-609.
- Andersson, P. K. (2021). Absolute Monarcho: A megalomaniac jester at the court of Queen Bess. TLS - The Times Literary Supplement (16 april).
- Andersson, P. K. (2021). Äktenskapet och ångvelocipeden: Sveriges förste bilkonstruktör och den tekniska manlighetens bräcklighet. Personhistorisk Tidskrift, 117 (1), 48-70.
- Andersson, P. (2019). Den vassa armbågen: Kroppsspråk som ämne för historisk forskning [The sharp elbow. Body language as a subject for historical research]. Historisk Tidskrift, 139 (1), 77-85.
- Andersson, P. (2019). 'High Collars and Principles': The Late-Victorian World of the Masher. Gender and History, 31 (2), 422-443.
Articles, book reviews
- Andersson, P. K. (2022). Har humorn en historia?. Scandia, 88 (1).
- Andersson, P. K. (2022). Recension av: Provflygningarna: platserna Andrée lämnade efter sig: [The test flights. The places Andree left behind]. Historisk Tidskrift, 142 (4), 664-666.
- Andersson, P. (2021). Racing the Street: Race, Rhetoric, and Technology in Metropolitan London, 1840-1900. Journal of British Studies, 60 (3), 765-766.
- Andersson, P. (2021). Review of: Projecting Citizenship: Photography and Belonging in the British Empire. English Historical Review, 136 (579), 454-456.
- Andersson, P. (2019). The experience of idling in Victorian travel texts, 1850-1901. Journal of Tourism History, 11 (3), 305-306.
Books
- Andersson, P. K. (2023). Fool: In Search of Henry VIII's Closest Man. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
- Andersson, P. K. (2021). Drontmannen.. Ellerströms förlag.
- Andersson, P. (2020). Komikerns historia. Stockholm: Natur och kultur.
- Andersson, P. (2018). Silent History: Body Language and Nonverbal Identity, 1860-1914. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
Chapters in books
- Andersson, P. K. (2021). Var på huvudet ska hatten sitta?: Subtila signaler inom hattbruk kring sekelskiftet 1900. In: Emma Severinsson, Philip Warkander, Modevetenskap: Nya perspektiv på mode, stil och estetik (pp. 66-85). Stockholm: Appell förlag.