Jon Stratton is an Australian academic who is an internationally recognised leading scholar in the field of cultural studies, with eleven sole authored books, five edited collections, over sixty book chapters, and over eighty journal articles. Stratton has been a media commentator for over twenty-five years in print, radio, and television. Stratton's first degree in European Literature and the History of Ideas, and Sociology was taken at Bradford University. There, Stratton 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 was David Edgar's The End, a history of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which was possibly the first play where the conclusion was decided by choices made by the audiences members on a computer at various points in the narrative. Stratton also acted in Howard Brenton's Scott of the Antarctic, also known as Scott of the Antarctic on Ice, because the first production took place on the ice rink in Bradford's Wardley House. Among the other productions Stratton also performed in Richard Crane's Crippen: A Music-Hall Melodrama, which the cast took to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 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, Armidale, Darwin, and Perth,. Stratton's work critically examines aspects of everyday life, and popular music, centred on issues of identity and cultural specificity. He has published widely from articles on soap opera to subcultures to cyberspace and books on postmodernity, the body and the role of race and multiculturalism in Australian culture. Stratton has also 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. Previously, Stratton was serving as professor of Cultural Studies at Curtin University, until retiring in 2014.
