Peter Stanfield is Emeritus Professor of Film at the University of Kent. He has a truant eye for pulp culture, a fine collection of vintage denim jackets and is the last of the MacMahonists. 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. More recently he has been focusing on pop histories with A Band with Built-in Hate: The Who from Pop Art to Punk and Pin-Ups 1972: Third Generation Rock and Roll. His epic tale of Eel Pie Island’s favourite sons – The Most Blueswailing Futuristic Way-Out Heavy Beat Sound of The Yardbirds – is scheduled for Spring 2025.

His latest book is Dirty Real: Exile on Hollywood and Vine with the Gin Mill Cowboys (Reaktion, 2024).