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Dr Guy Stevenson

Staff details

Dr Guy Stevenson

Position

Lecturer

Department

English and Creative Writing

Email

g.stevenson (@gold.ac.uk)

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

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

Publications and research outputs

Article

Stevenson, Guy. 2020. Diluting Holy Writ: From the ‘Men of 1914’ to the Beat Generation. Textual Practice, 34(9), pp. 1575-1598. ISSN 0950-236X

Stevenson, Guy. 2018. Straw Gods: A Cautious Response to Jordan B. Peterson. Los Angeles Review of Books,

Stevenson, Guy. 2018. The Colossus of Big Sur: A Review of 'On Henry Miller: Or How To Be An Anarchist' by John Burnside. Literary Review(465), ISSN 0144-4360

Book

Stevenson, Guy. 2020. Anti-Humanism in the American Counterculture. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9783030477592

Book Section

Stevenson, Guy. 2021. Fascism, Iconoclasm and the Global Village. In: Aaron Jaffe; Michael F. Miller and Rodrigo Martini, eds. Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781501348433

Stevenson, Guy. 2019. “Money and how it gets that way”: Ezra Pound, Henry Miller and the economic process of the 1930s. In: Ralf Lüfter and Roxana Preda, eds. A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Economics. Nordhausen: Verlag Traugott Bautz, pp. 97-110. ISBN 9783959483810

Stevenson, Guy. 2018. Alexander Trocchi. In: Jay Parini, ed. British Writers: Supplement XXV. 25th Edition. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Broadcast

Stevenson, Guy. 2018. Facebook Live: The Avant-Garde Tactics of the Alt Right.

Edited Journal

Stevenson, Guy, ed. 2020. Anti-Humanist Modernisms, Textual Practice, 34(9). 0950-236X

Thesis

Stevenson, Guy. 2015. Blast and Bless : Radical Aesthetics in the Writings of Henry Miller and Ezra Pound. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London

Conferences and talks

2023: ‘Understanding the Culture Wars: How the 60s Explain Our Divided Age’
University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (Visiting Lecture)

2021: ‘Counterculture 2.0: Grotesques of Transgression after Trump'
The University of Bedfordshire, Dept. of Art and Design, Bedfordshire (Visiting Lecture)

2020: ‘Perils of Expansion: Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs and the Limits of the Counterculture’
Modernism and Alternative Spiritualities Symposium Royal College of Art

2018: ‘The Tyranny of Cool: Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture’
European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres, Athens, Greece (

2018: ‘The Reality of the Counterculture: Marshall McLuhan, Iconoclasm and the Global Village’
European Network of Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies, Munster, Germany

2018: ‘Conservative Counterculture: The Avant-Garde Precedent for America’s “Alt-Right”’
The Chess Club, Mayfair (Invited Talk)

2017: ‘Trolling the Enlightenment: The Modernist Precedent for America’s “”Alt-Right”’
Futurism-Formism-Witkacy, Lodz, Poland

2017: ‘Rummaging through the Bone-Heap: Beat Writing and Reactionary Modernist Aesthetics’
European Beat Studies Network Annual Conference, Paris, France

2017: ‘The Brutal Tap: Anti-Humanist Legacies in the Counterculture’
Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

2016: ‘Disdaining the Tribe: The Anti-Humanist Basis of Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message”
Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference, Pasadena, California, USA

2016: Sacrifice and Expenditure: The Sexual Economics of Georges Bataille and Ezra Pound’
European Association of American Literature’s Biennial Conference, Constanta, Romania

2016: Blackballed by the Radicals: The Exclusionary Criteria of the Post-1945 American Avant-Garde’
BAAS/IAAS Conference, Belfast

2019: From Modernism to the Counterculture: Reassessing the 1962 Edinburgh International Writers’ Conference
nstitute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, The University of Edinburgh (organised)

2017: Think/Thing: A Symposium on Media Theory
Amsterdam, MSA

2014: A Gob of Spit in the Face of Art: A Symposium to Mark the 80th Anniversary of Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer’
Goldsmiths, University of London