Iain Michael Chambers

is a sociologist, historian and cultural studies scholar. Born in Britain he has lived in Naples since 1976. He is presently Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies at the Oriental University in Naples where he has been Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies, and presently coordinates the PhD programme in “Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone world.” He is known for his interdisciplinary and intercultural work on music, popular and metropolitan cultures. More recently he has transmuted this line of research into a series of postcolonial analyses of the formation of the modern Mediterranean. He is author of Urban Rhythms: pop music and popular culture (1985), Popular Culture: The metropolitan experience (1986), Border dialogues: Journeys in postmodernity (1990), Migrancy, culture, identity (1994), Hendrix, hip hop e l’interruzione del pensiero (with Paul Gilroy) (1995), Culture after humanism (2001); and most recently, Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (2008). He is also editor with Lidia Curti of The Post-colonial question: Common skies, divided horizons (1996,) and the volume Esercizi di Potere. Gramsci, Said e il postcoloniale (2006). Several of these titles have been translated into various languages, including Italian, Spanish, German, Japanese and Turkish.