Jon is Professor of Cultural Studies. He gained his PhD in Sociology from the University of Essex and has worked in Australia since 1980 coming to Curtin in 1990 after teaching at universities in Brisbane, Armidale and Darwin.
Jon has taught widely in areas like literary theory, social history, and cultural studies. At Curtin, among other teaching, he has developed units which critically examine aspects of everyday life and also on popular music. His work centres around issues of identity cultural specificity. He has published widely from articles on soap opera to serial killing to cyberspace and books on postmodernity, the body and the role of race in Australian culture.
Jon was Vice-President of the Australasian Cultural Studies Association between 2000 and 2004. He coedited the Transnational Cultural Studies series for University of Illinois Press between 1997 and 2000. In 1998 he held a Rockefeller Fellowship at the International Forum for United States’ Studies at the University of Iowa.
Jon is on the editorial boards of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies., The European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Perfect Beat: The Pacific Journal of Research into Contemporary Music and Popular Culture among other journals.