John Street

• 1972-1975 BA in Politics (1^st Class), University of Warwick  
• 1975-1978 DPhil, Nuffield College, University of Oxford

John Street is an Emeritus Professor of Politics in the School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies. He joined UEA in 1980, having completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford. His teaching and research has focused on the politics of media and culture.

His main teaching responsibilities were Politics and Media, and Politics and Popular Culture. He contributed to a number of other modules, including Media and Society and Power and Society. He has taught modules on the politics of technology, sound, democracy, and British socialism. In 2007, he received a UEA Excellence in Teaching Award. 

He has been the Principal Investigator on an AHRC project: 'Our Subversive Voice? The history and politics of the English protest song' (2020-22). The other members of the research team are: Alan Finlayson (UEA), Oskar Cox Jensen (UEA, not Newcastle University), Angela McShane (Warwick University) and Matthew Worley (Reading University). His previsous projects have included three work packages for CREATe, a centre funded by the AHRC and other research councils to investigate copyright and new business models in the creative industries. His particular projects focused on musicians and copyright and on the regulation of the collecting societies. He was also the Co-Investigator with Professor Matt Worley (University of Reading) on a Leverhulme project on the history and politics of punk, and with Dr Mark Rimmer (UEA) on an AHRC cultural value grant.  

Apart from work on the protest song, he is also researching the impact of celebrity politics, the politics of sound and silence and the regulation of the UK press.  

He is the author or co-author of seven book and some 80 articles. The third edition of his Media, Politics and Democracy was published in 2021. A special section of the British Journal of Politics and International Relations (2012) was devoted to his article on celebrity politics that appeared in the same journal in 2004, and which won the Best Article award for that year. 

With Simon Frith and Will Straw, he was a co-editor of The Cambridge Companion of Pop and Rock. He is a member of the editorial group of the journal Popular Music, and was one of its coordinatoing editors for several years. For 10 years, he wrote music reviews for the Times. He has written for New Socialist, Marxism Today, New Statesman, and a number of other publications, He has appeared on a number of broadcast programmes, including Radio 4’s ‘Thinking Allowed’ and ‘Taboo Be Do’, and BBC TV’s Daily Politics Show. 

He has supervised PhD students working on a range of topics, including the politics of music, new forms of political communication, and participatory democracy. He is a member of the Political Studies Association, the Subcultures Network, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and MeCCSA. 

He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He was until recently an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. 

• 1978-1989: Tutor in Politics, Merton College, University of Oxford  
• 1979-1980: Heyworth Research Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford
• 1980-1994: Lecturer in Politics, University of East Anglia
• 1994-1999: Senior Lecturer in Politics, University of East Anglia
• 1999-2003: Reader in Politics, University of East Anglia
• 2003-2022: Professor of Politics, University of East Anglia
• 2022-  : Emeritus Professor of Politics, Univewrsity of East Anglia

His main research interests are: the politics of copyright; the politics of popular music; the ‘popularization’ of politics; celebrity politicians; and cultural value and cultural policy.

Politics and popular culture/music; politics and media; celebrity politics; copyright policy.

He teaching focused on the relationship between politics, media and popular culture. He also taught on democratic theory, British politics, theories of politics and society, British socialism, sound and society, and politics and technology.

Teaching Activities

Module Organiser: Politics and Media, and Politics and Popular Culture.