Angela Mcrobbie

Angela McRobbie is a Fellow of the British Academy and has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Glasgow University. Her research expertise is on the creative economy and the fashion industry with reference to the small-scale independent sector.

Teaching, supervision and research

Over her years on Faculty at Goldsmiths Angela taught across several under-graduate and post-graduate courses and she supervised more than 20 PhD students to completion. These former students now hold full academic posts in a range of leading universities. From 1998 onwards, Angela helped to devise MA Culture Industries, MA Gender Media and Culture and MA Cultural Studies. She continues to provide guest lectures on all of these courses.

As a sociologist and cultural studies scholar Angela has books and publications on gender, sexuality, youth culture, girls’ magazines and popular culture that date back to the mid-1970s and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Much of this early work was re-printed and used in a range of Open University courses.

During the 1980s and 1990s she investigated the fields of cultural production and the early developments in the UK creative economy with articles and books on second-hand clothes and youth subculture labour markets. She also extended her work during this time to write on leading figures such as Susan Sontag and Walter Benjamin. She contributed various articles to journals such as Feminist Review, Cultural Studies, and the British Journal of Sociology. Over the decades her work has been translated into many languages.

Since 1998 her research has encompassed new creative economy with reference to the fashion sector. She has written about precarity, self-employment and the creativity dispositif. By 2022 she had completed three monographs on the creative industries, one of which (co-authored with two Goldsmiths colleagues) is the outcome of a successful bid to the AHRC in 2014 (CREAte grant). Angela is also a scholar in feminist social and cultural theory. Her most widely cited work of feminist theory (published in 2008) developed ideas of post-feminism and neoliberal culture.

This was followed by a further volume in 2020 which, drawing on Stuart Hall, investigated the vernacular and everyday passage of neoliberal values across British society. She has two volumes to be published in 2024 one is the first edited collection in the English language on the German artist and film director Ulrike Ottinger, and the other book brings together Angela’s early Birmingham work from the mid-1970s with new articles which update those themes of youth subcultures, young women and popular music, vintage dressing, and feminist methodologies. This will be published by the Goldsmiths Press. Angela is currently preparing a new study on the changes to the employment landscape of the women’s magazine sector.

See Angela's research outputs on Goldsmiths Research Online.