Ian Buchanan

In the summer of 2007 Buchanan organised the first "Deleuze Camp", a week-long summer school focusing exclusively on the work of Gilles Deleuze with instruction provided by Buchanan as well as Claire Colebrook, Gregg Lambert, Paul Patton and Dan Smith. An immediate success, the event was repeated in 2008 to coincide with the first international Deleuze Studies conference held to launch the journal of Deleuze Studies Buchanan founded in 2007. Both the camp and the conference are now a regular event – in 2009 they will be held in Cologne, and 2010 they will be held in Amsterdam.

In 1997 he moved to the Department of English at the University of Tasmania. He remained there until 2002. Then, following a brief stint as a research fellow at the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University, he moved to Charles Darwin University to take up the foundation chair of communication, later designating himself as professor of communication and cultural studies. From 2003—2005 he was the president of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia. In 2006 he moved to Cardiff University in Wales to take up the chair of critical and cultural theory vacated by Catherine Belsey. In 2011, Buchanan left Cardiff University, where he was based in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory.

In 1996, Buchanan was appointed on a one-year contract at the Department of English at the University of Western Australia to teach critical theory. That year he convened the first major conference on Gilles Deleuze to be held in Australia, and one of the first anywhere in the world. It attracted over 160 delegates and featured Fredric Jameson as keynote speaker. A selection of papers from this conference were edited by Buchanan as special issues of the journals Social Semiotics (vol 7:2, 1997) and South Atlantic Quarterly (vol 93:3, 1997), the latter was subsequently reprinted as the book A Deleuzian Century?

Born in rural Western Australia, Buchanan grew up in the suburbs of Perth. He did his BA and PhD in the English and Comparative Literature program at Murdoch University, graduating in 1995. His PhD dissertation, entitled, "Heterology: Towards a Transcendental Empiricist Approach to Cultural Studies" attempted to fuse the work of de Certeau and Deleuze for the purposes of doing cultural analysis.

Ian Buchanan (born 1969) is an Australian cultural theorist, currently serving as Director of the Institute for Social Transformation Research based at University of Wollongong. He has published works on Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze and Fredric Jameson. Buchanan is the founding editor of the Deleuze Studies journal, as well as a number of important book series dedicated to the work of Gilles Deleuze.