Dr Roger Fagge

Contact Information

Office: Room H334, third floor of the Humanities Building
Telephone: +44 (0)24 76523395 (internal extension 23395)
Email: Roger.Fagge@warwick.ac.uk
Office Hours 20/21: Monday 12-1, Tuesday 10-11

Academic Profile

1983-1986 Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London - B.A (Hons) Modern History
1986-1991 St. John's College, University of Cambridge - Ph.D.
1991 University of Warwick - Associate Professor in Department of History/Comparative American Studies

Undergraduate Modules Taught

Postgraduate Modules Taught

Race, Class and Jazz
Contributions to Core Course ( MA in Comparative American Studies)

Selected Publications

Power, Culture and Conflict in the Coalfields: West Virginia and south Wales, 1900-1922 (Manchester University Press, 1996)
'Political Identities in the West Virginia and South Wales Coalfields', in John Belchem and Neville Kirk (eds.), Languages of Labour (Ashgate, 1997), pp.186-212.
'"Citizens of this Great Republic": Politics and the West Virginia Miners, 1900-1922', International Review of Social History, 40 (1995), pp.31-50.
'A Comparison of the Miners of South Wales and West Virginia, 1900-1922', in Klaus Tenfelde (ed.), Sozialgeschichte des Bergbaus im 19 und 20 Jahrhundert/Towards a Social History of Mining in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Verlag CH Beck, Munich, 1992), pp.105-122.
'Eugene V. Debs in West Virginia, 1913: A Re-Appraisal', West Virginia History, 52 (1993), pp.1-18.
'A Reply of Sorts to David Corbin', ibid., p.32
'From the "Postscripts to Admass": J.B. Priestley and the Cold War World', Media History, Vol12, 6 (2006), pp. 103-15
'J.B. Priestley, the “modern” and America’, Cultural and Social History, 4, 4 (2007)
‘The finest or the damndest country in the world ?’: British Radicals and America in the 1930s., in Armstrong, Fagge and Lockley (eds), America in the British Imagination (2007)
The Vision of J.B. Priestley (Bloomsbury/ Continuum, 2012)
'"Let the People Sing" J.B. Priestley and the Significance of Music' , forthcoming Cultural and Social History,12, 4 (2015), pp. 454-63.
Roger Fagge and Nicolas Pillai (eds), New Jazz Conceptions: History, Theory, Practice (Routledge, 2017) (275 pp) [Book] including Fagge, ‘One of the most remarkable cultural phenomena of the century’: Larkin, Hobsbawm and Amis on Jazz’, pp.185-214.
'Eric Hobsbawm and the Significance of Jazz,' Cultural and Social History, 15:5, 745-762 (2018), DOI: 10.1080/14780038.2019.1568027
"Eric Hobsbawm', in The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies (2019)
Roger Fagge, 'The politics, aesthetics and dissonance of music in everyday life', Jazz Research Journal, Vol 13, No 1-2 (Special Issue: "Jazz and Everyday Aesthetics' ed. Fagge and Gebhardt) (2020)

Research

My research interests are in the fields of US Social and cultural history, comparative history, and jazz studies. Originally this took the form of research into labour and working class history, focusing on the cultural and political differences between coal mining communities in south Wales and West Virginia. On the completion of this research my focus shifted to a stronger concern with the role America has played within the English imagination in general, and the left, in particular. This included material on political figures as well as cultural commentators like Auden, Wells and J.B. Priestley. Whilst working on the latter, I became aware of both a lack of decent material on, and a tendency to undervalue, J.B.Priestley's contribution to British intellectual life. The resulting The Vision of J.B. Priestley (2012) explored Priestley's social and political views, including his relationship with politics, the mass society and America.

I have a longstanding interest in the history of music, have taught and spoken widely on Jazz and popular music My work on Priestley and wider intellectual history linked into this with the paper ‘“Let the People Sing”; J.B. Priestley and the Significance of Music’ in Cultural and Social History which explored the importance of music in his work, but his complicated relationship with popular music, including jazz. I co-organised the ‘New Jazz Conceptions: History, Theory, Methods’ conference at Warwick in May 2014. This included leading British jazz scholars, and in the discussions that followed we put together the book New Jazz Conceptions. My chapter develops my work on the relationship between British Intellectuals and Jazz, focusing principally on Eric Hobsbawn, Philip Larkin, and Kingsley Amis. I recently used Eric Hobsbawm’s papers at the Warwick Modern Records Centre, exploring more fully his relationship with Jazz, and I have just completed a paper which argues that Hobsbawm’s methodological approach to jazz history remains of great relevance.

I am co-investigator in the AHRC Research Network 'Jazz and Everyday Aethetics', a two-year project that explores the everyday value of jazz and the aesthetic experiences associated with it.http://jazzaesthetics.org/

I have an interest in the relationhsip between jazz and hip-hop, including the role of the musicians/MCs, their musical networks and collectives, the process of creative production, social class and the artist, race, and generational differences. This includes work on Miles Davis' relationship with hip-hop, and I am currently involved with others in putting together an edited collection on Davis' later career.

Recent Research Topics Supervised (PhD, MA)

Violence and history in video games
Music and the anti-apartheid movement
Trade Union Emigration Schemes
Social meanings in the works of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen
The social and cultural world of Hip-Hop
Politics and culture during the Harlem Renaissance
The United States and Indonesian Independence