Peter Marks is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Sydney, where he taught for 25 years. He previously taught at the University of Hull and completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Marks is particularly interested in the work of George Orwell; in relationships between literature and cinema, and between literature and politics; in literary periodical culture; in the essay form; in utopias, and in surveillance, particularly as depicted in literature and cinema.
Whilst in Bristol Professor Marks will focus on Orwell’s multi-faceted engagement with the BBC, whether as critic, employee, or as outside contributor. While the 2017 statue to Orwell outside the BBC’s New Broadcasting House suggests a beneficial relationship, Orwell infamously described his war-time employment at the BBC Eastern Service (1941-43) as “two wasted years”. The project proposes that his period working for the Eastern Service was far more consequential. Orwell would prove a cultural innovator, a deft political analyst, and an astute educator.
This project brings together the expertise of an Orwell scholar, Professor Marks, and his University of Bristol host Simon Potter, the leading BBC historian and Professor of History at the University of Bristol, to examine Orwell’s sustained and sometimes surprising BBC associations in-depth for the first time.
More details are available on Professor Marks' web profile page here.