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, Media Industry Analysis, Storytelling Across Media, and Wes Anderson and World Cinema as well as introductory courses in film, television, and digital 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, Popular Communication, and The Velvet Light Trap. He has written for The Washington Post and Time, and he has commented on the history and business operations of The Walt Disney Company for various media outlets, including El País, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, MarketWatch, and ZDF.

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, DEI policies in contemporary Hollywood, and the diffusion of generative AI in the US media industries.

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 serves as the Reviews Editor for Studies in Musical Theatre, and he co-organizes (with Jerome Dent and Ava L’Herisse) the Critical Approaches to Black Media Culture conferences. Since 2022, he has been one of the hosts of the New Books in Media & Communications and New Books in Film podcasts.