Professor Tim Lawrence

Tim Lawrence is the author of three major books on the history of music culture in the United States and in particular New York. The first of these Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-79, was published by Duke University Press on 2003 and stands as the first book to provide a sustained analysis of the rise of DJ culture and disco the United States during the 1970s.

The second, Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92, was published by Duke University Press in 2009 and remains the only book-length study of one of the downtown era's most innovative and itinerant musicians. The third, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-83, will be published in the autumn of 2016 and explores the period when disco, punk and rap/hip hop started to overlap in New York City during the early 1980s.

He has published in a range of journals, including Cultural Studies, Dancecult, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Liminalities, Loops, New Formations, Social Text, Third Text and Yeti. He is a regular contributor to the Wire and has given guest lectures in Amsterdam, Berlin, Bologna, Bremen, Coventry, Faensa, Glasgow, Hamburg, Liverpool, London, Los Angeles, Milan, New Jersey, New York, Oxford, Philadelphia, Rome, Salford and Stockholm. In 2013 he gave a talk on New York's downtown party culture at the Southbank Centre's Rest of Noise festival. The Museum of Modern Art is launching Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor in October 2016. His research was included in one of the impact case studies UEL submitted to REF2014.

Tim is a founding member and co-director of the Centre for Cultural Studies Research. He has staged numerous events with CSSR, including the four-part Critical Beats series with the Wire and the Music, Politics, Agency series. He co-curated an Arthur Russell Tribute night at the ICA and co-organised the Kiss Me Again: Mapping the Life and Legacy of Arthur Russell conference with New York University. He is also a founding member of Lucky Cloud Sound System, which has been putting on Loft-style parties in East London since June 2003.