Short biography, 2026 (including for copying; do edit as required).
George McKay is Professor of Media Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. His research interests are in popular music from jazz to punk, festivals, alternative culture and media, social movements and cultural politics, disability, and gardening. Outside the day job, he plays double bass.
Among his books are Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties (Verso, 1996), ed. DiY Culture: Party & Protest in Nineties Britain (Verso, 1998), Glastonbury: A Very English Fair (Gollancz, 2000), co-ed. with Pete Moser Community Music: A Handbook (Russell House, 2004), Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain (Duke UP, 2005), Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism & Rebellion in the Garden (Frances Lincoln, 2011), Shakin’ All Over: Popular Music and Disability (Michigan UP, 2013), ed. The Pop Festival: History, Media, Music, Culture (Bloomsbury, 2015), and, with Emma Webster, Music From Out There, In Here: 25 Years of London Jazz Festival (2017). His most recent work is the 32-chapter The Oxford Handbook of Punk Rock (Oxford UP, 2025), co-edited with Gina Arnold.
He is currently working on a monograph for Routledge provisionally called Popular Music, Environment, Climate Emergency: Here Comes the Sun, as well as a co-edited volume The Jazz Festival.
Prof McKay was a founding editor in 2002 of the Routledge journal Social Movement Studies. He has edited special issues of the journals Popular Music, and International Journal of Heritage Studies. He has also edited book series for Edinburgh University Press and Bristol University Press.
Among his 40+ funded research projects, he has been a member of several EU ones: Society & Lifestyles (FP6; 2006-08), Rhythm Changes (HERA; 2010-12), and CHIME (Heritage+ JPI; 2015-17). He was Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellow co-leading its £30m Connected Communities programme (2012-19), and a REF2021 subject panel member for Communication, Cultural & Media Studies (2021). He is currently an international peer review panel member for the Flemish and Polish research councils FWO (Brussels) and NCN (Kraków).
His website is georgemckay.org.
If required, author photographs are available for download here.
Click below if you are REALLY interested for a (rather long) CV. I suggest at most skim-reading, or settling down with a cup of tea if you are, for whatever reason, extremely committed / curious.