Professor Jim McGuigan

biography : publications : workshops & talks : links

(B.Sc., M.Phil., P.G.C.E., Ph.D., F.R.S.A.) is Professor of Cultural Analysis in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. After studying at the Universities of Bradford, Leeds and Leicester, Jim worked as a research officer at the Arts Council of GB and as a script editor in BBC TV’s Drama (Plays) Department. His research at the Arts Council was published in 1981 as Writers and the Arts, which immediately attracted a great deal of media attention and public debate. The main project he worked on at the BBC was a Play for Today, Country, written by Trevor Griffiths, directed by Richard Eyre and produced by Ann Scott. He was once accused on the radio by the late Mary Whitehouse of being in the pay of the media corporations and doing public relations on their behalf, which anybody who actually knows Jim would find rather surprising.

Jim has worked in various institutions of higher education over the years. In 1998, he found himself at Loughborough in the congenial research environment of the Department of Social Sciences. His interests cover the following: contemporary social theory, cultural studies and policy, and television and representation. He has published a number of books, his best known being Cultural Populism, which came out in 1992. Since then, he has published Culture and the Public Sphere (1996), Cultural Methodologies (1997), Modernity and Postmodern Culture (1999, 2nd edn 2006), and Rethinking Cultural Policy (2004); and he has co-edited Studying Culture (1993 & 1997) with Ann Gray and Technocities (1999) with John Downey. As well as several chapters in edited collections, he has published articles in Anglo-Saxonica, Cultural Politics, Cultural Studies, Cultural Studiesß>Critical Methodologies, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Flow, Guaraguao - Revista de Cultura Latinamericana, Human Technology, International Journal of Cultural Policy, The Leveller, Media International Australia, New Left Review, New Socialist, New Statesman, Poetics, Sociological Review and Sociology. His work has been translated into a number of languages, including Chinese. Jim’s most recent empirical research project was on the Millennium Dome, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board. He is also a Visiting Fellow in Cultural Policy at the University of Warwick, a Panel Member and College Member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts. He serves on five editorial boards and has various links with universities around the world where he has been a visiting professor.

Currently, he is working on two main research themes: ‘cool capitalism’ and ‘funny politics’. On the undergraduate programme in Social Sciences at Loughborough, he teaches modules in Cultural Analysis, Contemporary Social Theory, and Television; and on the postgraduate programme in Media and Cultural Analysis, he teaches the core module, Media and Modernity. The research topics of his present and recent Ph.D. students are Hollywood synergy, intrinsic value and instrumentalism in cultural policy, popular culture and the third age, television in China, tourism in Greece, video games, the wedding ceremony, and the work of Manuel Castells.