Dr Jan Butler is a Senior Lecturer in Popular Music and co-founder of both the Popular Music Research Unit and the Sound on Screen Research Unit at Oxford Brookes. Her research focuses on how media shapes our understanding of and narratives about music, as well as considering how music contributes to the media that we consume. She has most recently published on Baz Luhrmann soundtracks. She is currently writing about Brian Wilson, considering how authenticity functions in depictions of Bob Dylan on film, and working with generalist teachers to unlock their musical confidence and increase musical participation in primary schools.
Charlotte Doesburg is a Leverhulme Trust Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Somerville College. Her current research project focuses on identity negotiations and cultural revitalisation in metal music from the transnational region of Karelia (Finland-Russia). In 2022, she obtained her PhD on national identity and the adaptation of Karelian Finnish folklore in Finnish metal music from the School of Eastern European and Slavonic Studies, UCL. She has an MA in Finnish language and culture from the University of Helsinki and a BA in Finno-Ugric Languages and Cultures from the University of Groningen. Her articles are published in various journals, including Metal Music Studies and the Journal of Finnish Studies. She is also the co-editor for Multilingual Metal: Sociocultural, Linguistic, and Literary Perspectives on Heavy Metal Lyrics (Emerald) and the forthcoming edited volume The Cat’s Pyjamas: Cats in Culture and Society (Inter/Connexions).
Patryk Gałuszka is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Sociology, the University of Lodz, Poland, and a co-editor of Popular Music History. He has edited two books: Made in Poland: Studies in Popular Music (Routledge, 2020) and Eastern European Music Industries and Policies after the Fall of Communism (Routledge, 2021), and co-authored one book: Crowdfunding and Independence in Film and Music (Routledge, 2021). His articles have been published in journals such as International Journal of Communication, Poetics, Information, Communication & Society, Popular Music, Popular Music & Society, and Media, Culture & Society. His research interests include the creative industries, popular music studies, and economic sociology.
Dai Griffiths retired from Oxford Brookes University in 2020 and continues independently to study popular music. His first published research article, as David Griffiths, on Bruce Springsteen, also appeared in Popular Music (volume 7 number 1, 1988).
Dr. Jason Ng is an independent scholar and recent Research Ireland postdoctoral fellow at University College Cork, investigating hip hop with a focus on cultural entrepreneurship through beat-making, dance and other forms of cultural production in the Asia-Pacific region. His work explores the intersections between contemporary music cultures, media, creative industries, urban geographies and globalisation.
J. Griffith Rollefson is Professor and Head of the Department of Music at University College Cork, National University of Ireland, where he studies the intersections of Black music and postcoloniality. He is the author of Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality (University of Chicago Press, 2017)—winner of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Ruth Stone Award—and Critical Excess: Watch the Throne and the New Gilded Age (University of Michigan Press, 2021). From 2019-2024 he was Principal Investigator of the €2m ERC CoG research initiative CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation, developing theory, methods, and digital infrastructure for the interdisciplinary field of hip hop studies. As part of that ongoing project, he became founding co-editor of the community-engaged OA journal, Global Hip Hop Studies (with University of Cape Town’s Adam Haupt) and editor of the multi-authored OA textbook, Planet Rap: Global Hip Hop and Postcolonial Perspectives. Rollefson is currently the recipient of an ERC Proof of Concept grant to develop his 3rdAI Hip Hop Research Engine into an income generator for hip hop arts and education projects (2025-2026). His third monograph, “The Big Pill”: Black Musical Metaphysics and Enlightenment Binaries, is in development with University of Chicago Press.
Dr Jennifer Skellington is a scholar of popular music studies and music journalism whose work examines the cultural, institutional, and sociopolitical dynamics shaping music writing, music discourse and the music industries. In recent work Jennifer has offered a sociologically grounded analysis of how non‑Western music was represented in the 1980s British broadsheet press. Her current research investigates how contemporary music journalists articulate their professional identities, value systems, and relationships to the music industries they mediate, with particular attention to centre–periphery dynamics in the digital age. Jennifer lectures predominantly on the Music Business degree course at Southampton Solent University where she also co‑supervises PhD students and is an active member of the university’s Music, Creativity, and the Cultural Economy Research Group.
Michaël Spanu holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Lorraine and is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at the University of Manchester. He specializes in cultural and creative industries, with a focus on music globalization, public policy, and urban development. Over the past twelve years, he has worked as a consultant with public institutions, international organizations, cultural businesses, and research agencies, conducting studies and strategies in Europe, Latin America, North America, and the Middle East. He is the founder of Persona Research Lab.
