Professor Stephen Graham is the Head of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences.

Stephen was Executive Dean of the Faculty of Creative Arts and Media and Professor of Music (and formerly Head of School and Senior Lecturer) at Goldsmiths, University of London from 2021 to 2025. In this period, Stephen established and co-chaired an institutional practice research group, co-led on institutional partnerships and chaired or co-chaired various institutional restructure boards.

Stephen was Co-Head of Music at Goldsmiths from 2018-2020, where he led on new course developments and collaborated on the Department's submission to the Research Excellence Framework (to which he also submitted several outputs as a researcher himself). Between 2012-2018, Stephen was Admissions Tutor, Director of Studies, Exams Officer and Personal Tutor in Music. From 2009 to 2012, Stephen lectured at King's College, the University of Westminster, Brunel and Goldsmiths.

Stephen’s research applies cultural theory and philosophy to contemporary music, invariably seeking to map and make cultural meaning through that music.

Stephen's first monograph, Sounds of the Underground, was published by University of Michigan Press in 2016. Stephen's second monograph, Becoming Noise Music, was published by Bloomsbury in 2023. Stephen co-authored a multi-generic history of twentieth century music for Cambridge University Press, Western Music in the Twentieth Century (2022, with Prof Tom Perchard, Prof Holly Rogers and Dr Tim Rutherford-Johnson). Stephen and Dr Roddy Hawkins' The Work of New Music is currently under contract with Cambridge.

Stephen wrote book chapters on popular modernism (Routledge, 2018), fringe music writing (Routledge, 2024) and popular music biography and life writing (Oxford, 2025), and has book chapters forthcoming on global noise music, 'under modernism' and on the composer Amber Priestley and the wider field of 'post-compositional coordination'. 

Stephen's article on late style and popular music appeared in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association in 2021; an article on 1970s fringe music writing in 20th Century Music in 2019; an article on reality television and popular music in Popular Music in 2017; an article on formal structures and cultural meaning in Justin Timberlake in American Music in 2014; and an article on underground and fringe music culture in Perspective of New Music in 2010. Stephen currently has an article under review at the Journal of the American Musicological Society on Beyoncé and authorship in popular music. Stephen is working on a further book project on fantasy and the musical imagination and a collaborative research project on music, aging and wellbeing.

Twentieth and twenty-first century music, including underground, experimental, popular, and art musics; music and cultural theory/philosophy; music analysis; music and psychology.