Dr Peter Brooke

My research is concerned with African politics and culture in the second half of the twentieth-century, specifically the ways in which the colonial state, liberation movements, Cold War powers and postcolonial governments tried to exploit the mass media with mixed results. I am particularly interested in radio broadcasting and its impact on audiences in Zambia and Ghana. I have also published on British decolonisation in Kenya, Commonwealth immigration to Britain and the history of so-called ‘multi-racialism’. 

I am a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Communication and Media Studies, University of Johannesburg and an Associate Member of the History Faculty at Oxford. My current research project on 'Radio Revolution: Gender, Race and Power in Africa, 1940-1990' is generously funded by the British Academy / Leverhulme Trust.

I came to Oxford from King’s College, London in 2017, where I taught colonial and modern British history. I studied at the University of Cambridge as an undergraduate and MPhil student before taking my doctorate at King’s College.