John Scanlan is a writer and researcher and the author of eight books including 'Easy Riders, Rolling Stones: On the Road in America from Delta Blues to 70s Rock' (2015), described by the Guardian as ‘a wonderfully evocative musical odyssey,’ which was also optioned for film; 'On Garbage' (2005), a philosophical essay on waste and worthlessness described by Thomas Lynch in his review for the London Times as ‘a small masterpiece’; and most recently, 'Rock ‘n’ Roll Plays Itself: A Screen History' (2022). He has published academic articles on subjects related to a wide range of cultural phenomena — such as time, language, design, sensory experience, visual images, place and waste — in journals including History of the Human Sciences, Places, Time & Society, Photographies, Techniques & Culture, Space and Culture, as well as in edited volumes such as Matthew Gandy and B.J. Nilsen’s 'The Acoustic City' and a French edited volume, 'Recycler l’Urbain'. His work has appeared in Italian, French, Croatian, Turkish and Arabic translations. He has spoken about his work and appeared as the featured guest on national and international media, including BBC Four TV’s ‘The Secret Life of Rubbish’ (2012), BBC Radio 3’s ‘Night Waves’, ABC Radio National’s ‘The Philosopher’s Zone’ and ‘Perspective’ in Australia, and the BBC World Service. For almost two decades Scanlan taught undergraduates, postgraduates and supervised PhD students, mainly at the University of Bristol and Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), but also at the Universities of Glasgow, Salford and the West of Scotland. At MMU he was the recipient of one of the university’s first ‘Future Leader’ research awards and was also Acting Director of the Centre for Transitions in Society and Space (CTSS) between 2011 and 2013 and co-led its cross-faculty submission to the Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014), a UK-wide research evaluation that takes place every 7-8 years. Prior to that he has a key member of the AHRC Centre for Environmental History at the University of St Andrews (2003 to 2007), where his work formed part of a REF 2014 impact study, which was titled ‘Science, Waste and Environment: Informing a Sustainable Future through an Examination of the Past’, making up part of an institutional submission in the subject of History that was ranked 7 out of 83 universities for ‘impact’ (attaining a GPA of 3.58, where ‘3’ is classed as ‘internationally excellent’ and the maximum of ‘4’ is ‘world leading’). Scanlan is also the co-founder and series editor of Reaktion’s ‘Reverb’ series of books, which has — since 2010 — commissioned some two dozen titles and whose recent successes include Seth Bovey’s acclaimed Five Years Ahead of My Time: Garage Rock from the 1950s to the Present (Shindig! magazine’s book of the year, 2019) and Mark Doyle’s widely-praised The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached. After leaving academia in 2015 to work on film projects, he collaborated with the BAFTA- and Emmy-nominated film director/producer Alex Harvey on a number of projects, including an eight-part TV series on the life and adventures of Malcolm McLaren, titled ‘Trash’, which accumulated serious backers and production partners (including a major UK TV network) but has not thus far made it to screen (and currently resides in that place known commonly as ‘development hell’). Other projects developed in this period included ‘Road Music’, a film by Alex Harvey (currently in production) based in part on ideas explored in Scanlan’s 2015 book, Easy Riders, Rolling Stones.