Peter Stanfield has a truant eye for pulp culture and is Emeritus Professor of Film, University of Kent. His publications include Maximum Movies—Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane and Jim Thompson, which takes a long look at our fascination with a lowbrow aesthetic, and The Cool and the Crazy: Pop Fifties Cinema that picks over cycles of sensational movies produced to capitalise on current events, moral panics and popular fads. Hoodlum Movies: Seriality and the Outlaw Biker Film Cycle, 1966-1972  further develops ideas on film cycles and pulp cinema.

Popular music’s interaction with film is a key theme in all of his outputs, whether that is a singing cowboy’s blue yodel, the siren call of a torch singer, the calypso beat of a juvenile delinquent pic, or the greasy chug n’ churn of an outlaw biker movie soundtrack. That tradition is continued with Dirty Real: Exile on Hollywood and Vine with the Gin Mill Cowboys (2024). Recently he has focused on pop histories with A Band with Built-in Hate: The Who from Pop Art to Punk (2021), Pin-Ups 1972: Third Generation Rock and Roll (2022) and the epic tale of Eel Pie Island’s favourite sons The Yardbirds– The Most Blueswailing Futuristic Way-Out Heavy Beat Sound (2025)