Jon Stratton

Jon Stratton is an Australian academic and scholar in the field of cultural studies. He has authored 11 sole books, edited five collections, and written over 80 journal articles. For over 25 years, he has been a media commentator in print, radio, and television.

Education and career
Stratton studied European Literature, History of Ideas and Sociology as part of his first degree at Bradford University. He was a member of the Drama Society which functioned under the direction of the University Fellow in Theatre, Chris Parr. Stratton performed in many first-run productions of plays by early career playwrights, some of whom became important in British avant-garde theatre. Among the plays in which Stratton performed were David Edgar's The End (1972), a history of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Howard Brenton's Scott of the Antarctic (1971), also known as Scott of the Antarctic on Ice, and Richard Crane's Crippen: A Music-Hall Melodrama (1971), which the cast took to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in the same year.

Stratton has a PhD in sociology from the University of Essex and has worked in Australia since 1980, teaching at universities in Brisbane (Griffith University, Queensland University of Technology, University of Queensland), Armidale (University of New England), Darwin (Northern Territory University), and Perth, (Curtin University).

Stratton's work critically examines aspects of everyday life, and popular music, centered on issues of identity and cultural specificity. His published works include articles on soap operas, subculture, cyberspace, postmodernity, the body, and the role of race and multiculturalism in Australian culture. Stratton has published three books on issues associated with Jewishness and identity.

Stratton was Vice-President of the Australasian Cultural Studies Association between 2000 and 2004. He co-edited the Transnational Cultural Studies series for University of Illinois Press between 1997 and 2000. In 1998, he held a Rockefeller Fellowship at the International Forum for United States' Studies at the University of Iowa. Stratton has been the chief investigator for two Australian Research Council grants. Most recently, in 2013, on the history of popular music in Perth. Stratton is on the editorial boards of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, the European Journal of Cultural Studies, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Perfect Beat: The Pacific Journal of Research into Contemporary Music and Popular Culture amongst other journals. Stratton is an editor of the e-journal Borderlands.

Stratton is actively publishing and is an adjunct professor in the School of Creative Industries at University of South Australia. He served as professor of Cultural Studies at Curtin University until his retirement in 2014.