For most of his professional life Peter has been thinking about the idea of culture as it has been shaped and reshaped over the past two hundred years, and about the processes and perils of literary guardianship, especially in the complex, mobile, and interconnected world that emerged in the course of the long twentieth century. This guiding preoccupation has informed his work on censorship, the rise of mass culture, media history and questions of the book, the public value of literature, critical theory, and interculturalism. It has also led Peter to write on an eclectic range of authors, including Arnold, Beckett, Bennett, Blanchot, Bourdieu, Brink, Breytenbach, Amit Chaudhuri, Coetzee, Conan Doyle, Conrad, Derrida, T.S. Eliot, Gordimer, Kirsty Gunn, Sarah Howe, Jensma, Joyce, Krog, Lawrence, Matthews, Mehrotra, Mphahlele, Ndebele, Pound, Rushdie, Serote, Tagore, Woolf, and Yeats. Peter teaches literatures in English from around 1830 to the present and critical theory.