Reflecting on Peter the Teacher

by Julian Potter

Thirty years separate Peter and Zygmunt, another thirty separate myself and Peter. These are generational spans, time enough for considerable changes that challenge traditions. Through my story, I would like to suggest that the refounding of intellectual traditions on friendship, instead of, and sometimes in spite of institutions, or enframed goals such as politics, is one of Peter’s gifts to his postmodern students and those who have met him along the way. Another is the vital question for scholarly endeavour: ‘Is it interesting?’ And for me, the love of books.

“Peter’s House of Theory” – A Postcard to Peter

by Margaret Somers

I fell in love with Peter the first time I met him, at an American Sociological Meeting, sometime in the late 1980s, I think. This was, of course, love Beilharzian-style – not the amorous variety but an intimacy of shared political intellectual practice. The ASA was a fitting place to meet as it was one of Peter’s most fertile sites for his Beilharzian love assignations.

Review Essay: The Posthumous Bauman

Review Essay: The Posthumous Bauman

By Matt Dawson

2023 saw six new books by, and about Zygmunt Bauman published. 6 years after his death, these texts were part of an emerging body of literature we may call The Posthumous Bauman. I explore the key lessons this literature has offered and suggest there are four key themes: our increased knowledge of Bauman’s life and its link, or not, to his sociology; the role of the hinterland for the sociologist; the increased interest in Bauman’s lifelong sociological project before he came to Leeds; and the differing receptions of Bauman’s work.

Friendship’s Resonance: On Peter Beilharz’s Goodwill

by Howard Prosser

This is a tale of friendship. Or, more accurately, it’s a reflection on how a friendship based on a few meetings can amount to a lot. I am sure many of us have had a version of this experience. The friendships made during a stint living elsewhere. Or those incidental meetings and interactions with someone at infrequent events which, though it never quite blossoms into something more, we can still define as friendship.

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.