Staff Profile

Background

I grew up in the North East of England. Before arriving at Newcastle University in 2015 I worked in the music industry in Manchester (co-founding the band Everything Everything), completed a DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2013, then worked as assistant editor at New Left Review in London.

In 2014, I co-founded the publisher Repeater Books with Mark Fisher, Tariq Goddard, Tamar Shlaim, Matteo Mandarini and others. I am currently editor-at-large at Repeater and a columnist at Tribune magazine.

Qualifications

BA (Bristol)

MSt (Oxford)

DPhil (Oxford)

Writing

I am the author/editor of 8 books:

Prose:

• Folk Opposition (Zero, 2011; Italian trans. Nova Europa, 2020)
• Definitely Maybe 33 1/3 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)
• New Model Island (Repeater, 2019)
• The Repeater Book of Heroism (Repeater, 2022) (ed. with Tariq Goddard)
• Letters of Basil Bunting (Oxford University Press, 2022) (ed.)
• The North Will Rise Again (Bloomsbury (trade), February 2023)

Poetry:

• The Last Tape (Zero, 2014) 
• Newcastle, Endless (Canalside Press, 2021) 

[For journal articles and book chapters see 'Publications']

Media and public engagement

• I write regular long and short-form journalism for a wide readership. Writing has appeared in: the Guardian, the New York Times, New Statesman, the Independent, Pitchfork, Tribune, LA Review of Books, Jacobin, VICE, Salon and elsewhere. 
• I have given public talks or lectures about my work at NYU, the Houses of Parliament, the Durham Miners' Gala, the University of Oxford, Glasgow School of Art and elsewhere.
• I have appeared in broadcast media features on BBC Radio 3, ABC (Australia), Resonance FM, Novara Media and elsewhere. 

Supervision

• I would be happy to supervise postgraduate students researching the art and identity of the north-east, modernist and contemporary poetry, intersections between literature, popular music and contemporary politics and the history and afterlife of the Anglo-American counterculture.
• I have previously co-supervised two Northern Bridge/AHRC-funded doctoral projects to completion (Dr Jake Morris-Campbell and Dr Mandana Mashayekhi-Ghoyonloo) and I am currently supervising a third (Dafydd Sinden). I am also currently co-supervising a further two doctoral projects (Steve Kendall and Andrew Latimer) and an MPhil (Mike Tickell).

SEL3429: Deep North: Modern Literature of the North East (convenor)

SEL8540: Poetology (convenor)

SEL6632: Dissertation in English Literature

• Niven A. The Communist Manifesto and the Exhumation of Literature. In: Mark Steven, ed. Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism. London: Bloomsbury, 2021, pp.40-49.
• Niven A. New Model Island: How to Build a Radical Culture Beyond the Idea of England. London, UK: Repeater, 2019.
• Niven A. Why Labour is losing the north. New Statesman 2019, 21 Aug 2019.
• Niven A. The Socialism of T. Dan Smith. Tribune 2019, Spring 2019, 33-37.
• Niven A. 'Writing the Unwritten': The Poetry of Tom Pickard. Los Angeles Review of Books 2018, 3 July.
• Niven A. 'To the king onely to put value': monarchy and commons in Pound’s Canto 109. Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary 2018, 10, 355-370.
• Niven A. 'An English Rust Belt?'. Jacobin, 2017. Available at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/07/corbyn-labour-white-workers-deindustrial-north-britain-tories.
• Niven A. 'Mark Fisher: 1968-2017'. Jacobin, 2017. Available at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/mark-fisher-capitalist-realism-vampire-castle.
• Niven A. How Radiohead Became, For a Time, the World's Biggest Political Band. New York: Pitchfork, 2016. Available at: http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/1134-how-radiohead-became-for-a-time-the-worlds-biggest-political-band/.
• Niven A. 'Beyond Waterloo Sunset'. In: Fordham, M, ed. Uncommon London. London, UK: Uncommon, 2015, pp.136-140.
• Niven A. 'Forget Cool Britannia – we should reclaim the subversive spirit of 1994'. The Guardian, 2014. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/13/forget-cool-britannia-reclaim-subversive-spirit-1994.
• Niven A. 'North Sea Travelogue'. The Junket 2014. The Junket, (11).
• Niven A. Oasis' Definitely Maybe (33 1/3). Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.
• Niven A. Oh mother: The Smiths and Thatcher. In: Fruela Fernandez, ed. The Smiths: Musica, Politica y Deseo (“The Smiths: Music, Politics and Desire”). Errata Naturae, 2014.
• Niven A. The Last Tape. Zero, 2014.
• Niven A. The Road to Briggflatts. New Left Review 2014, II(89), 149-159.
• Niven A. 'Towards a Common Culture: On Literature and the School Syllabus'. Review 31 2014, 9 June.
• Niven A. Tom Pickard. In: Jay Parini, ed. British Writers Supplement XX. Charles Scribner's Sons, 2014, pp.189-205.
• Niven A. Towards a New Architecture: Basil Bunting’s Postwar Reconstruction. ELH 2014, 81(1), 351-379.
• Niven A. Welcome To The New Age: 2014 and The New Utopian Pop. London: The Quietus, 2014. Available at: http://thequietus.com/articles/14261-pop-music-2014-retromania-futurism.
• Niven A. 'Faintly Transcendental: On The Poetry Of Graham Foust'. The Quietus, 2013. Available at: http://thequietus.com/articles/12306-graham-foust-to-anacreon-in-heaven-and-other-poems.
• Niven A. The Formal Genesis of Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts. Cambridge Quarterly 2013, 42(3), 203-224.
• Niven A. The Matter of Capital, Christopher Nealon, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2011; The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Garde, Ruth Jennison, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Historical Materialism 2013, 21(3), 205-212.
• Niven A. 'Martin Amis, Geezer-Prat, and His Unfortunate Clichés Of Britishness'. The Quietus, 2012. Available at: http://thequietus.com/articles/09146-martin-amis-blur-cool-britannia-lionel-asbo.
• Niven A. Folk Opposition. Zero, 2011.
• Niven A. 'Kicking the Geordies when they're down'. The Guardian, 2011. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jun/03/geordies-cheryl-cole-geordie-shore.
• Niven A. 'That rather bathetic variety of parlour song’: James Joyce and modernist elementary music. In: Brian Griffin and Ellen McWilliams, ed. Irish Studies in Britain. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010, pp.191-203.