Steve Waksman is the Leverhulme International Professor of Popular Music at the University of Huddersfield, UK. His publications include the books Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Harvard University Press, 1999), This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (University of California Press, 2009), and Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyoncé (Oxford University Press, 2022). His books have won multiple awards including the Woody Guthrie Prize given by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U.S. Chapter, and the Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society.

With Reebee Garofalo, Waksman is the co-author of the sixth edition of the rock history textbook, Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A. (2014), and with Andy Bennett, he co-edited the SAGE Handbook of Popular Music (2015). His essays have appeared in such collections as the Cambridge Companion to the Guitar, Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop, Metal Rules the Globe, and The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre and Popular Music. On WRSI radio, The River in Western Massachusetts, he has long been featured as the “Doctor of Rock,” offering bits of popular music history in support of Black History Month and Women’s History Month. His latest book is The Cambridge Companion to the Electric Guitar, co-edited with Jan-Peter Herbst.

In 2008, Waksman was the keynote speaker at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s American Music Masters event honoring the legacy of musician and inventor Les Paul. His dissertation on the electric guitar won the 1998 Ralph Henry Gabriel prize awarded by the American Studies Association. Currently he is beginning a new project devoted to the study of amplification technologies and amplified sound, funded by a £5 million grant from the Leverhulme Trust.

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Last updated 8th June 2026

Steve's research covers a wide range of topics in the study of popular music, which include:

- The history of musical instruments, with a particular emphasis on the electric guitar.

- Intersections of music and technology. This includes current research on amplification technology.

- Genre studies, with a special interest in heavy metal and punk, but also including jazz, blues, country, rock, pop, and hip-hop.

- The study of live music, encompassing music venues, audiences, prevailing styles of performance, the live music economy, and the technical infrastructure and personnel required to stage live music events.

- Sound studies.

- Popular music studies and historiography.

- Studies of race, gender, sexuality, and identity in popular music of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.