Core expertise
Media and cultural studies
Biography
Paul’s work is concerned with the interaction of history, heritage and archives with/in/about media and cultural studies. He’s interested in questions about the history of media, exploring a range of forms as sites of historical mediation, and the production of ways of thinking about and experiencing the historical.
Framing much of his research is a political economy approach to the mediation of history, locating it in the context of wider field of policy and creative production, and exploring what is at stake by asking: Who speaks about the past, when, in what forms and about what issues, and with what effect and affects? The political economy approach underwrites his sense of the production of histories and role in them as practitioner, focused in particular on concepts and practices of heritage and archive formation.
The objects of study that have brought these themes together and that continue to anchor them include: popular music history – particularly the manner in which music forms offer an affective means of encountering ideas and sensibilities of the past; vernacular archives of popular culture; the political economy, policy and affective experience of the archive; the refugee archive; curating popular music history.
