Professor Stephen Graham
Biography
Professor Stephen Graham is the Head of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences. Stephen was Executive Dean of the Faculty of Creative Arts and Media and Professor of Music (and formerly Head of School and Senior Lecturer) at Goldsmiths, University of London from 2021 to 2025. He was Co-Head of Music at Goldsmiths from 2018-2020.
Stephen studied at UCD and King’s College London, completing a PhD at Goldsmiths. After teaching at King’s College London, University of Westminster and Brunel, Stephen become a Lecturer in Music at Goldsmiths in 2011.
Stephen’s first monography, Sounds of the Underground, was published by University of Michigan Press in May 2016. Stephen's second monograph, Becoming Noise Music, was published by Bloomsbury in 2023. Stephen co-authored a multi-generic history of 20th century music for CUP, Western Music in the Twentieth Century (2022, with Tom Perchard, Holly Rogers and Tim Rutherford-Johnson). Stephen and Roddy Hawkins' The Work of New Music is under contract with CUP.
Stephen wrote book chapters on popular modernism (Routledge, 2018), popular music biography and life writing (Oxford, 2025) and fringe music writing (Routledge, 2024), and has book chapters forthcoming on global noise music and the composer Amber Priestley. His article on late style and popular music appeared in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association in 2021 and a piece on 1970s fringe music writing in 20th Century Music in 2019, and various peer-reviewed articles appeared in journals such as American Music and Popular Music.
Stephen is developing articles on authorship and on modernism, and a book project on fantasy and the musical imagination.
Research Interests
Twentieth and twenty-first century music, including underground, experimental, popular, and art musics; music and cultural theory; music analysis; music and psychology.
Publications
Books
Becoming Noise Music. 2023. London: Bloomsbury. 9781501378669.
Twentieth-Century Music in the West (co-authored with Tom Perchard, Holly Rogers and Tim Rutherford-Johnson). 2022. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 9781108680899.
Sounds of the Underground. 2016. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 978-0-472-11975-2.
Book chapters
‘Popular Music Biography and Life Writing’. In Oxford Handbook of Musical Biography and Life-Writing. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press [forthcoming].
'Familiarity Breeds Consent: Proximity and Distance in Fringe Music Writing'. In Ian Pace and Christopher Wiley eds. Writing on Contemporary Musicians: Promotion, Advocacy, Disinterest, Censure. Routledge [forthcoming].
‘Modernism for and of the Masses: On Popular Modernism’, in Bjorn Heile and Charles Wilson eds., 2018. The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism, London: Routledge.
‘Historical Documents of the Irish Avant-Garde’ [various entries]. In Jennifer Walshe, ed. 2015. Historical Documents of the Irish Avant-Garde. Aisteach Foundation.
Selected articles
‘Summer’s Gone: Late Style and Popular Music’. Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 2021, 146(2), pp. 315-333. ISSN 0269-0403 ISSN 0269-0403.
‘From Microphone to the Wire: Cultural change in 1970s and 1980s music writing’. Twentieth-Century Music, 2019, 6(3), pp. 531-555. ISSN 1478-5722.
‘The X Factor and Reality Television: Beyond Good and Evil’, In Popular Music, Volume 36, Issue 1 (The Critical Imperative), January 2017, pp. 6-20. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143016000635.
‘Justin Timberlake's Two-Part Complementary Forms: Groove, Extension and Maturity’. In American Music, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter 2014), pp. 448-474. DOI: 10.5406/americanmusic.32.4.0448.
'(Un)Popular avant gardes: Underground popular music and the avant garde', in Perspectives of New Music, 2010, Vol. 48, No. 2.
Professional Activity
Stephen was appointed to the Peer Review College of the Arts and Humanities Research Council in 2017. He has been a member of the Editorial Board of Goldsmiths Press since 2016 and of the Journal of the Society of Musicology in Ireland since 2024. He has acted as regular referee for the journal Popular Music since September 2011.
Stephen worked regularly as a music journalist from 2009 to 2015. He was published in The Guardian and The Quietus, and wrote for the contemporary music journal Tempo from 2013-2015, and for the Journal of Music in Ireland from 2011-2012.
Since 2015 Stephen has been interviewed on West German Radio, on the BBC, on RTÉ, in the Metro and in the Irish Times. He appeared in a Channel 5 documentary on ABBA and on Al-Araby TV on the subject of movie musicals. Stephen presented the podcast, Talking Musicology, from February 2016 to September 2019. Since April 2022, Stephen has been consulting on changes to the Music Theory curriculum for the ABRSM.
Teaching Activity
Stephen’s teaching focuses on experimental music and historical musicology.