The Peers Collection is arranged into groups of Books (catalogued separately) pamphlets, press cuttings (arranged chronologically), lecture notes and correspondence relating to Spain during the Civil War and its aftermath and letters, notes and press cuttings relating to his work on Spanish Mystics

The material is grouped in three broad sections:

• PEERS I-VII: The Spanish mystics
• PEERS VIII: Offprints of Peers' work on other subjects
• PEERS IX-XXX & BII/12: Press cuttings and ephemera relating to the Spanish Civil War and later Spanish politics

E.Allison Peers (1891-1952) was appointed lecturer in Spanish at the University of Liverpool in 1920 and Gilmour Professor of Spanish in 1922. He was the first to recognise the importance of Spanish Studies in Great Britain after the First World War, and campaigned tirelessly to promote Spanish through lectures, conferences, holiday courses in Spain (San Sebastian) and England, and in publishing a stream of textbooks, anthologies and study aids.

Peers believed passionately in higher education teaching methods based on original research and hard learning. He provoked lively debate and major contribution to the polemic of university problems and policies in the 1940's by publishing, under the pseudonym Bruce Truscot', he published two controversial and highly influential books, Redbrick University(1943) and Redbrick and these Vital Days(1945). Published at a crucial period in the debate over the future form and development of post-war universities, they contained thinly-disguised criticism of some of the leading educationalists at Liverpool.

In 1923 he founded the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, the column analysing contemporary events in, 'Spain, Week by Week' equipped him admirably, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, to write with astonishing prescience The Spanish Tradgedy(1936) and Spain, the Church and the Orders (1939) - a defence of the Catholic Church.

Peer's output was prolific, amounting to the writing or editing of some 60 books. His works Studies of the Spanish Mystics(1927-1930)The History of the Romantic Movement in Spain(1940) were ground-breaking and his translations of the complete works of San Juan de la Cruz and Santa Teresa have received international acclaim and and the imprimatur of the Catholic Church - a significant achievement for a scholar who was neither a Roman Catholic by conviction nor a theologian by training.

His scholarship was rewarded with distinctions from the universities of Glasgow, Madrid, Columbia, New York, New Mexico, California, Cambridge, Oxford, the Hispanic Society of America and the Institut d'Estudis Catalans. Peers died in December 1952 at the age of sixty-one.