Professor John Richardson is an expert in several fields, including the cultural study of music, audiovisual research, popular music studies, contemporary music studies, gender studies, ecocriticism, the cultural study of technology and research-creation. He holds dual Finnish and British citizenship, gained BA, MA and PhD degrees from the University of Jyväskylä (1992; 1995) and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California at Los Angeles (1996-7) before working at several universities in Finland (University of Jyväskylä; Helsinki University; Åbo Academy University) and Britain (City University, London; De Montfort University, Leicester). In 2011, he was appointed to his current position, Professor of Musicology at the University of Turku. He is additionally Docent in Musicology at the University of Helsinki, and Docent in Music and Media at the University of Turku. Recently, he has taken an interest in developing mixed methods research methods, combining techniques of close reading, ethnography and other qualitative methods and cultural analysis. Richardson is an active songwriter and musician. His first solo album, The Fold, was released in 2017. He is working on a second, The Pine and the Birch, which is schedule for release in 2022, and a collaborative creative of project on the exoplanet system Trappist-1. This creative work is the subject of ongoing research in the field of research-creation. 

John Richardson is the author of An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal(Oxford University Press 2012) and Singing Archaeology: Philip Glass’s Akhnaten (Wesleyan University Press 1999). He is additionally co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (eds. Richardson, Gorbman & Vernallis 2013), The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (eds. Vernallis, Herzog and Richardson 2013), Music, Memory, Space (eds. Brusila, Johnson & Richardson 2016), Essays on Sound and Vision (Richardson & Hawkins, 2007), and Einstein on the Beach: Opera beyond Drama (eds. Novak & Richardson, Routledge, 2019). He recently coedited a special issue of the online journal Radical Musicology on Queer Sounds and Spaces (with Pääkkölä & Jarman, 2019). He is currently working on a monograph on new approaches to recent audiovisual forms, and co-editing a book on music videos in the nordic region. Recent article topics range from an ecocritical study of the composer Hildur Guðnadóttir's soundtrack for the television series Chernobyl (forthcoming in Music and the Moving Image) to an article on how so called "bedroom aesthetics" is transforming the music landscape through close readings of the music and music videos of Billie Eilish.    

Richardson's recent teaching includes the Musicology MA and PhD seminars, courses on audiovisual analysis, music video analysis, close reading of music and the arts, the cultural study of music technology, and music industry fields and practices,.