Dr Guy Stevenson

Guy specialises in literary modernism, the 1960s counterculture, and their political and cultural legacies today.

Staff details

Dr Guy Stevenson

Position

Lecturer

Department

English and Creative Writing

Email

g.stevenson (@gold.ac.uk)

Guy lectures and works on English and American Literature. His research looks at the politics of experimental 20th century cultural movements (from early twentieth century modernisms and the 1960s counterculture to hip hop) with an emphasis on their impact on the history of ideas around race, gender and sexualities. In his 2020 monograph, Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), he wrote about the mid-century bohemian school, the Beat Generation, and he recently edited a special journal issue on the turn against Enlightenment humanism in writers from Djuna Barnes to Michel Houellebecq (Anti-Humanist Modernisms, for literature and theory journal Textual Practice). Both were completed during a visiting fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Guy is currently working on a new cultural history of the 1960s, which explores the origins of post-Trump, post-Brexit divisions over the politics of identity.

Academic qualifications

  • PhD, 'Blast and Bless: The Radical Aesthetics of Henry Miller & Ezra Pound', Goldsmiths, University of London 2015
  • MA, Issues in Modern Culture, University College London (UCL) 2008
  • BA, English Literature, University of Bristol 2006

Teaching and supervision

Research interests

Guy’s main project relates to a short course he teaches at Goldsmiths, called “Understanding the Culture Wars”. The project uses analysis of novels, poems, plays, essays, song lyrics, television broadcasts, readings of key public debates between public intellectuals (Germaine Greer vs Norman Mailer/ James Baldwin vs William Buckley) to explain divisions over race, sexualities and gender in the 1960s. It traces contemporary conflicts over these issues through the ‘60s (via the Sexual Revolution, Civil Rights and Black Power) into the 1970s and beyond, including struggles for female, gay and trans liberation, and the development of racial politics into online culture wars over ‘cancel culture’ and ‘woke-ness’.

He writes reviews and cultural criticism for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and Literary Review, and is working on essays and chapters about Radical Feminism and Jean Genet (Parallax, 2025), William Burroughs' legacy in punk (Burroughs in Context, CUP, 2025), and the Marquis de Sade’s unsettling relation to the 1960s (Understanding Sade, Understanding Modernism, Bloomsbury, 2024).

Featured publications

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