Please join the American & Canadian Studies Department for our final event of the semester: a double-header on Rock n Roll!

Randall Stephens (Northumbria University), will talk about “Rock and Religion in the 1950s South”. Simon Philo (University of Derby), will talk about “How the Beatles Liberated America”. The two will also have a public debate with one another, and with Nick Heffernan (University of Nottingham), who will chair the event, plus a discussion with audience members.

Randall Stephens was appointed Reader in History/American Studies at Northumbria in 2012. Born and raised in Kansas, Stephens writes and teaches about the American South, religion in the US, and popular music. He is editor of the history magazine Historically Speaking and associate editor of the journal Fides et Historia. Stephens is the author of The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South (Harvard University Press) and The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, co-authored with Karl Giberson (Harvard University Press). In spring 2012 he was a Fulbright Roving Scholar in American Studies in Norway. He has also written for the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Atlantic blog, and the Christian Century.

Simon Philo is Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader in American Studies at the University of Derby. He has published research on MTV as a global media phenomenon; The Simpsons and the BBC; the three “ages” of Punk; American teen TV; British Pop Art; reggae “vs” America; British cinema and TV in their transatlantic context. He is currently working on a book tracing the cultural history of Brit-pop from the 1950s to the present.