John is the Principal Investigator for Our Subversive Voice and Professor of Politics at the University of East Anglia. Much of his research and writing has been about the politics of music.

His books include Rebel Rock: The Politics of Popular Music (Blackwell, 1986); Politics and Popular Culture (Polity, 1997); Music and Politics (Polity, 2012); (with Sanna Inthorn and Martin Scott) From Entertainment to Citizenship (Manchester University Press, 2013); and Media, Politics and Democracy (Macmillan, 2021). For ten years, he wrote live music reviews for The Times. He is a member of the editorial group of the journal Popular Music.

Oskar was the project's Senior Research Associate, based in Politics at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London (Duckworth, 2022); The Ballad-Singer in Georgian and Victorian London (Cambridge, 2021); and Napoleon and British Song, 1797–1822 (Palgrave, 2015); and co-editor of Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture (Oxford, 2018) and a special forum of Journal of British Studies: “Music and Politics in Britain” (2021). He was a founding member of the Romantic National Song Network and the Nineteenth-Century Song Club.

As of October 2022 he is a NUAcT Fellow in Music at Newcastle University. Oskar also writes both songs and novels, and is represented by Joanna Swainson.

Alan is Professor of Political and Social Theory at the University of East Anglia. In his academic work he has developed themes and theories about rhetoric in order to understand how political ideas spread and animate people, through all kinds of media on various stages and involving different sorts of performance. He also writes about British politics for newspapers such as the Guardian and for online sites such as Open Democracy, and he co-founded the Undergraduate Political Speech Competition for the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom.

Alan’s co-produced podcast limited series Reactionary Digital Politics reports on findings from a three-year AHRC-funded research project investigating how digital media are affecting rhetoric and politics, and can be found wherever you get your podcasts.

Angela is Hon. Reader in History at the University of Warwick. Her academic work includes writing histories and various media appearances on the topics of intoxicants and the material cultures of everyday life in early modern Europe and North America, but her first love was and is now the popular political songs of the seventeenth century – and she is always keen to get others interested in them too (see her cunningly bringing these things together here).

As well as writing a reference work and publishing numerous book chapters and journal articles on political ballads, she’s currently writing a history of the ballad business that made and marketed them and the people that sang and heard them. Some of the most popular political songs of the era have been specially recorded by the Carnival Band for a database project she’s been working on with Professor Chris Marsh called 100 Ballads: Hit Songs of the Seventeenth Century, which will be freely available by late 2022. Excitingly, several more will be recorded specially for Our Subversive Voice.

Matthew is a Professor of Modern History at the University of Reading. He has written widely on British politics and culture in the twentieth century, including the monograph No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–84 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). As a co-founder of the AHRC-funded Subcultures Network, he is involved with editing a book series with Palgrave Macmillan and collaborating with the Youth Club Archive. At present, plans are on-going towards a Museum of Youth Culture.

Previously, Matthew has worked with the artist Scott King under the rubric of Crash!, producing publications and artworks that have been shown globally. His current research is focused on punk-related fanzines.

Helen makes the arrangements for Our Subversive Voice’s public programme, which includes two concerts and a touring exhibition exploring themes from the research. Helen has been involved in events management and the creative industries for fifteen years. Most recently she was a trustee at Bloc Projects in Sheffield.

As a practicing visual artist she has exhibited work throughout the UK and Europe including at Snape Maltings during the Aldeburgh Festival, with the New English Art Club at the Mall Galleries in London and at Hybrid Art Fair in Madrid.