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Lecturer in English, specialising in popular musical and subcultural studies., Manchester Metropolitan University

My research considers countercultural legacies in Britain. I want to know why we should care about movements like post-punk, for instance. How were they bound up with the political shifts of their eras? What can we learn from the ways they were produced and received? How did factors like class and education play a part? And whose interests are served by the ways that popular music and subcultures get represented, remembered and reworked - in literature, film and other cultural forms?

These questions inform my book Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). They also guide my current research into how countercultural legacies inform contemporary culture and politics, from hipsters to urban regeneration.

I have also spent two years as a researcher on the Leverhulme project ‘Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture’ with the historian Matthew Worley and the politics scholar John Street and am a member of the Interdisciplinary Network for the Study of Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change.

Experience

  • –present
    Lecturer in English, specialising in popular musical and subcultural studies., Manchester Metropolitan University