THE CULTURAL COMMENTATOR
Chris Turner seems inexorably drawn to the unusual.
After reading anthropology, archaeology and art history at Cambridge University, he went on to complete a PhD on the cultural history of ‘Disgust’ at the London Consortium, a post-graduate PhD programme in the Humanities at the University of London, where he has also taught.
In 2003-2004 he did a stint as a visiting scholar at Columbia University during which time he also worked as a consultant on respected playwright David Hare’s play ‘Stuff Happens’, dealing with the events that led up to the 2003 Iraq war, a production that has since been showcased across the world.
He’s a prolific writer and commentator; the editor of Icon magazine, and an editor of Cabinet magazine, as well as a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, the Sunday Telegraph and The Guardian.
Last year Turner published Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America, an engaging, amusing and occasionally shocking history that traces the life of Wilhelm Reich, one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry – disciple of Freud, contemporary of Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, J D Salinger, Paul Burroughs, and a host of other cultural icons who were intrigued and influenced by his work.
The book received a Jerwood / Royal Society of Literature Award and was chosen as a book of the year by the New Yorker, Economist and Boston Globe, apart from rave reviews and excerpts in the world’s top newspapers including the New York Times and The Independent, among others.
