Peter Stead obituary

Other lives: Swansea University historian whose attention focused on popular culture and its practitioners

My friend Peter Stead, who has died aged 82, spent almost his entire academic life at Swansea University, where he lectured on modern history from 1966 to 1997. Thereafter he was an influential figure in the public discourse of Wales, as a commentator in print and a broadcaster on radio and television – for many years, with the journalist Patrick Hannan, he represented Wales on BBC Radio 4’s Round Britain Quiz.

He was best known as the creator in 2005 of the International Dylan Thomas prize for writers aged under 39 (Thomas’s age at his death), across the genres of poetry, fiction, drama and scriptwriting. It was initially awarded biennially, with help from various sponsors, but Peter took great pride as the founder president in seeing it established as an annual award from 2014, with the support of Swansea University in his home city. Notable winners have included Rachel Trezise, Max Porter, Guy Gunaratne and Patricia Lockwood.

Peter was born in the seaside resort of Barry, the elder son of Elvira (nee Price) and John Stead, but because of the various postings of his father, a policeman, the family moved around south Wales and Peter would claim its various coastal and valley towns as his very own.

After Barry grammar school, in 1957 he went to Gowerton grammar school, and then on to study history at Swansea University, graduating with a first in 1964. He began doctoral research but within two years had joined the staff and, apart from two stints as a Fulbright scholar in the US, and a late appointment as an external professor at the University of Glamorgan, remained there, latterly as senior lecturer, until taking early retirement in the 90s. Witty and eloquent, he was adored by students.

His early academic publications were fine-grained studies of the dynamics of Lib-Lab politics in Edwardian Wales, and Coleg Harlech (1976), an account of the significance of adult education for autodidacts in the south Wales coalfield. However, increasingly his attention focused on popular culture and its practitioners. In 1989 he published a well-received monograph, Film and the Working Class, and in 1991 a scintillating study of his hero, Richard Burton, So Much: So Little.

This was followed in 1993 by Dennis Potter and in 2002 by Acting Wales: Stars of Stage and Screen. The performative genius of 20th-century south Wales was his thematic passion, and essays and co-edited volumes on rugby and football players, boxers, opera singers and actors flowed. In a sense he was one such himself, for this quintessential product of that vanished world wanted, above all, to proclaim the legacy of its cultural worth and its once global impact.

In 1971 he married the cosmologist Elizabeth Hilton, who survives him.