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Angela is also the Chair of the Stuart Hall Foundation. Her research expertise is on the sociology of the creative economy, working lives in the cultural sector, and the fashion industry with reference to the small-scale independent sector. Her pioneering early work in cultural studies from the mid 1970s investigated girls’ magazines, youth subcultures and popular culture, including the DIY micro-economies of post-punk second-hand ragmarket fashion.

Angela is also a leading feminist social and cultural theorist looking at the gendered dynamics of contemporary neoliberal society. Angela’s research, now spanning five decades, has been translated into many languages. She is currently preparing a third volume of feminist theory titled Feminism and the Swing to the Right, and a collection of 10 articles on a range of artists, writers and film-makers titled Feminism and the Popular Arts.  Angela has delivered the Annual British Studies Lecture (2025) at the Humboldt University, Berlin, and the Annual Cultural Studies Lecture (2025) Regensburg University in Bavaria.  

Recent publications

Books

• 2024 Feminism, Young Women and Cultural Studies: The Birmingham Essays from 1975 Onwards. The Ã山ǿ¼éÓ×Å® Press.
• 2024 Ulrike Ottinger: Film, Art and the Ethnographic Imagination (ed and contributor) Intellect Books
• 2022 Fashion as Creative Economy (with D. Strutt and C. Bandinelli) Polity Press.
• 2020 Feminism  and the Politics of Resilience, Polity Press.
• 2016 Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries, Polity Press.

Journal articles

• 2026 ‘Feminism and the ‘Great Moving Right Show’ Soundings, 90-91, May.
• 2025 ‘On the Phantasms of Gender: A feminist cultural studies perspective’ European Journal of Cultural Studies.
• 2024 ‘No Such Thing as Peacetime: Notes on Gaza, Hannah Arendt and Cultural Studies’, European Journal of Cultural Studies.
• 2022 ‘From ragmarkets to creative economy’ Angela McRobbie in Conversation with Toby Bennett, Journal of Cultural Economy.  

Teaching and research

Over her years on Faculty at Ã山ǿ¼éÓ×Å® Angela taught across several under-graduate and post-graduate courses and she supervised more than 25 PhD students to completion. These former students now hold full academic posts in a range of leading universities.

Following an under-graduate degree at Glasgow University Angela began her research career at the now world-renowned Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University under the leadership of Prof. Stuart Hall. Her writing from the mid 1970s onwards was taken up and used on degree courses in many universities across the world. It continues to be relevant today including the on UK National Curriculum for A Level Sociology.

During the 1980s and 1990s Angela developed new research pathways on the sociology of cultural production and the early developments in the UK creative economy. She also extended her work during this time to write on leading figures such as Susan Sontag and Walter Benjamin. She contributed various articles to journals such as Feminist Review, Cultural Studies, and the British Journal of Sociology.

Since 1998 her research has encompassed the new creative economy with specific reference to the fashion sector. She has written about precarity, self-employment, gender and cultural labour. By 2022 she had completed three monographs on the creative industries, one of which (co-authored with two Ã山ǿ¼éÓ×Å® colleagues) was the outcome of a successful bid to the AHRC in 2014 (CREAte grant). As a scholar in feminist social and cultural theory, her most widely cited work developed ideas of post-feminism and neoliberal culture. The volume titled The Aftermath of Feminism (2008) has been translated into many languages.

See Angela's .