Peter Beilharz and Modernity in Ruins

by George Steinmetz

I first met Peter, I believe, at the meetings of the American Sociological Association in Montréal in 2006. After the panel I struck up a conversation with Peter, went out for coffee with him, and discovered two amazing things. The first was that Peter was the beating heart of the journal Thesis Eleven, which I had been familiar with since graduate school.

A Meeting of Minds: Peter Beilharz, Public Intellectual and Friend

by Philippa Mein Smith

Over the past two decades Peter Beilharz, Thesis Eleven’s Founding Editor, has inspired me and clarified my thinking and direction on two themes that have infused my work ever since we met: first, the concept of the Antipodes; and second, the idea of cultural traffic. I am grateful to know ‘Peter B’, an internationally celebrated critical cultural theorist and one of Australia’s leading public intellectuals, as a collaborator and friend. It is a comfort, too, to find that friendship and collaboration continues effortlessly as it evolves through time due to Peter B’s continued engagement both with me, and with my former students and colleagues from the University of Canterbury (UC) in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Three Lectures: Travel notes, Bendigo, October 2014

by Ivan Vladislavić

It was more of a performance than a ‘lecture’. Peter played Marx and one of his colleagues played Weber, and they argued about class and other things. A young woman took issue with their focus on the classic texts. Why bother to read them? You can learn the same stuff by watching The Sopranos – and it’s more entertaining. She was very stubborn about this, which they enjoyed.

Puzzling Australia

by Peter Murphy

I think that what happened to both of us separately but in unconscious tandem in the 1990s says a lot about the intellectual framing of Australian society and history. We both, unwittingly, without any preconception of this, moved away from a politicised interpretation of Australian society (typical of much of Australian historiography) toward a view that placed art and aesthetics at the centre of social analysis.

A Story of Friendship: An Homage to Peter Beilharz

by María Pía Lara

This reflection is tied up with the memoir written by my dear friend Peter Beilharz (2020), Intimacy in Postmodern Times: A Friendship with Zygmunt Bauman. Indeed, Peter’s process of understanding himself not only allows us to learn about him as a person and as an intellectual, but it also explores some important dimensions of his sociological thinking in connection with his friend.