About the authors

Author of Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction

John Storey

is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland, UK and Chair Professor of the Changjiang Scholar Programme at the Comparative Cultural Studies Centre, Shaanxi Normal University, China. He has published widely in cultural studies, including twenty-six books. The most recent is Radical Utopianism and Cultural Studies (2019).

Website author

Dr Karen Atkinson

lectures in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland and is an Associate Lecturer on the MA in Mass Communications at the University of Leicester.  She has published research papers in this area, as well as in the field of critical discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. She is co-author of Language and Power in the Modern World (2003).
Thanks go to John-Paul Green and Dr Tony Purvis for supplying materials for earlier versions of this website and to Allan Verth for help with contemporary examples of popular culture. Special thanks is also given to the many students on the ‘Cultural Theory and Popular Culture’ module, co-taught by Dr Karen Atkinson and Professor John Storey, for their insightful feedback and useful discussion of twenty-first-century popular culture texts and practices.

Website author

Ania Malinowska

is Assistant Professor in media and cultural studies at the University of Silesia, Poland. Her research interests embrace critical theory, popular culture, digital materialism, posthumanism and love studies, but specifically focus on the formation of social and cultural norms and aesthetics under changing cultural practices. She is co-editor of Materiality and Popular Culture: The Popular Life of Things (with Karolina Lebek, Routledge 2017), The Materiality of Love: Essays on Affection and Cultural Practice (with Michael Gratzke, Routledge 2018), special issue of Open Cultural Studies, ‘Media and Emotions. The New Frontiers of Affect in Digital Culture’ (with Toby Miller), and Data Dating. Love, Technology, Desire (Intellect 2021).She is currently working on a monograph Love in Contemporary Technoculture (under contract with Cambridge University Press).