Peter Kunze

Peter C. Kunze’s research and teaching interests include US media history, media aesthetics, industry studies, convergence culture, and children’s media. He regularly teaches Disney and US Culture, Film Analysis, Media Industry Analysis, Race and the Hollywood Musical, Storytelling Across Media, and Wes Anderson and World Cinema as well as introductory courses in film, television, and media studies. He also runs the department’s internship program and teaches the accompanying senior seminar.

Kunze’s research has appeared in Black Camera, Creative Industries, Feminist Media Studies, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and The Velvet Light Trap. His first book, Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance (Rutgers University Press, 2023), examines the influence of theatrically-trained talent on Disney and of Disney on the theatre industry through a revisionist history of the Disney Renaissance. His current research projects examine the digitalization of US animation, historiographies of unproduced films, and DEI policies in contemporary Hollywood.

In 2016, he co-founded the Children’s and Youth Media and Culture Special Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and he currently co-chairs the Media Industries Special Interest Group. He sits on the SCMS Professional Development Committee as well as the board of the Children’s Literature Association. He also serves as the Reviews Editor for Studies in Musical Theatre and as an editorial board member of International Journal of Disney Studies, Literature/Film Quarterly, and the Unmade Film and Television Book Series (Bloomsbury). Since 2022, he has been one of the co-hosts of the New Books in Film podcast.