Profile

Prof Garry Whannel, Professor of Media Cultures

• Head of Centre for International Media Analysis
• Convenor, Popular Culture Working Group, International Association For Media and Communication Research

Garry Whannel has been working at the University since 1999. He is one of the world’s leading experts on the cultural analysis of media sport, and has written extensively on media, culture, leisure and sport for over 25 years. His major publications include:

• Culture, Politics and Sport: Blowing the Whistle Revisited London: Routledge, 2008
• Media Sport Stars, Masculinities, and Moralities London: Routledge, 2002
• Fields in Vision: Television Sport and Cultural Transformation, London: Routledge, 1992

He also co-edited the introductory textbook Understanding Television London: Routledge, 1990 (with Andrew Goodwin) which is widely used in Media Studies courses.

He is the Organiser of the Journalism and the Olympic Games Research Group (JOG), a group of eminent scholars from five universities. In addition he is involved on research into the growth of commercial sponsorship. Other research interests include political humour and the relation between the popular and the avant-garde in music.

Professor Whannel would welcome proposals for research projects at MA or MPhil/PhD level on media sport; journalism, politics and the Olympic Games; commercial sponsorship, the history of political comedy.

Throughout the 1980s he worked as a freelance television researcher and journalist; and worked on several television documentaries about the Olympic Games. Before that he spent several years as a media technician, involved in film, television and electronic music.

He gained a BA in Media Studies from Polytechnic of Central London in 1978, as part of the first cohort of students on the first Media Studies degree in the world. He went on to be a postgraduate student at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, completing his PhD in 1987.

When not working Garry Whannel plays piano, clarinet and guitar, all badly; and likes cooking.