Keith Negus entered higher education as a mature student, having spent many years playing keyboards and guitar in a variety of bands after leaving school. He gained a degree in Sociology from Middlesex Universit and then completed a PhD study of the acquisition, production and promotion of recording artists at SouthBank University. He subsequently taught at the Universities of Leicester and Puerto Rico and was based in the Department of Media and Communications prior to moving the Department of Music at Goldsmiths. He is Director of the Popular Music Research Unit, convenor of BMus Popular Music, convenor of the MA Music (Popular Music Research) and a coordinating editor of Popular Music (Cambridge University Press). Michael has published over a hundred articles and chapters in edited collections. These cover a number of areas including popular music, racism and popular culture, imperialism and theatrical history, Mass Observation, working-class writing, news and documentary, stereotyping and representation, humour and comedy, creativity and cultural production, media and memory, and historical hermeneutics. Overall his work covers the fields of media and communication studies, social and cultural history, and the sociology of art and culture. Michael has also written extensively on research methods, having edited collections on methods in cultural studies and memory studies, and been co-author of Researching Communications (Bloomsbury, 2007), along with David Deacon, Peter Golding and Graham Murdock. He has recently completed a major AHRC research project on music in the workplace, with Marek Korczynski of Nottingham University and Emma Robertson of La Trobe University. Their book, Rhythms of Labour: The History of Music at Work in Britain, is published by Cambridge University Press. With Emily Keightley, Michael is currently involved in a research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust on media and memory. Their book The Mnemonic Imagination is published by Palgrave Macmillan.