New Wave

New Wave: Image is Everything traces the evolution of the often neglected pop music genre, new wave. Using artists from Elvis Costello to Cyndi Lauper as illustrations, the book argues that new wave was among the first flowerings of postmodern theory in popular culture.

"Falling through the cracks between canonical studies of punk and recent work on post-punk, the music and culture of New Wave remain unexplored by scholars or critics. Matthew Adkins' New Wave: Image is Everything goes a long way in filling in this gap. Full of insights and theoretically rich, this book sets new wave against the backdrop of 1980s image culture, tracing its roots in Pop Art and deftly mapping the connections between music, media and that cultural condition which came to be known as postmodernism." - Will Straw, McGill University, Canada

M. King Adkins works primarily in the fields of postmodernism and popular culture. During a postdoctoral fellowship at Georgia Tech, he began seeking ways to connect these research areas to STEM education. Currently he serves as Assistant Professor of Humanities at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City, South Dakota.