Anna McCully Stewart
Doctoral Student in Literature - Anna's thesis is entitled ‘Reading Viz magazine: Class, masculinity and protest in North East print culture since Thatcher'.
Research Project Title:
Reading Viz Magazine: Class, Masculinity and Protest in North East Print Culture since Thatcher
Supervisors:
Dr Alex Niven, Dr Kirsten Macleod and Dr Mel Gibson (Northumbria)
Contact Details:
Email: a.mccully-stewart2@ncl.ac.uk
Research Interests:
- Comedy
- Zines, free presses and the material text
- De and post-industrialisation
- The history and culture of North East England
- Oral history
- Critical theory
Brief Outline of Research Project:
My research provides the first in-depth scholarly study of the British magazine Viz (1979 -). It is a cultural history which situates Viz in the context of the social and economic immiseration of North East England from the 1970s onwards, arguing for its function as an embodiment of protest against deepening neoliberalism. Drawing on archival holdings and interviews, the project assembles a history of Viz as a radical phenomenon which shaped popular perceptions of class, region and gender. It also assesses Viz’s impact on twentieth-century periodicals, demonstrating that its emergence precipitated a series of seminal shifts in British magazine culture.
Conferences
“Comic book scanners as editors? Using archival lacunae to my theoretical advantage.” SHARP Conference 2024, University of Reading, July 2024
“‘The North-East Development Corporation are choking on their skinny macchiatos’: Viz and Newcastle’s place-myth”, Place and the Periodical: An International Conference on the Regional Magazine, University of Chester, June 2024
'Left school? No job? No money? Then fuck off'. Resisting 'the good life' with Viz magazine'. Comics as/and Resistance, Oxford Comics Network conference, University of Oxford, June 2023
"Re-reading Viz magazine", Renewal: SELLL Postgraduate Conference, Newcastle University, June 2023
"Rude Kids and Skinheeds: Paternalism and Viz magazine, 1979 - 1984", Paternalism, Deference, and Hegemony: Insights and New Directions workshop, Labour and Society Research Group, January 2023