Peter Andersson

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.