Kent Worcester is an American political scientist, historian, critic, and songwriter. His work deals with popular culture, intellectual history, trade unions, and social democracy. He has written extensively on comics and graphic novels and wrote a biography of C.L.R. James, the West Indian intellectual, among many other publications.
Worcester is an important contributor to the growing body of critical literature on comics and graphic novels. His writings place particular emphasis on their social and political impact and subtext. Worcester has been contributing to since 1993, and was a blogger for tcj.com from 2008-2010. He coedited A Comics Studies Reader with Jeet Heer. The book received the Peter C. Rollins Book Award in 2009 for its contribution to popular culture and American studies. Worcester, Heer, and Charles Hatfield co-edited The Superhero Reader, which was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work in 2014. Worcester is the author of C.L.R. James: A Political Biography, which was part of a resurgence of scholarly interest in the life and work of the Caribbean writer, socialist, and anticolonial activist. Other works by Kent Worcester include studies of trade union responses to neoliberal economic restructuring from the 1970s to the 1990s in Britain, the United States, and Europe. He wrote a history of the Social Science Research Council, which was commissioned by then President Kenneth Prewitt for the organization’s 75th anniversary in 2001. Worcester edited a collection of essays for the American Political Science Association, Navigating Political Science, which deals with professional concerns in the field and with theoretical and methodological questions.
Singer/songwriter
In the 1980s Worcester was a singer, songwriter, and rhythm guitarist for the satirical rock band The Dog’s Breakfast. He wrote "Changes", "Father Song", "New York", and "Paul is Dead" for the group's album Beautiful Banality. He contributed several songs to recordings by guitarist and songwriter Matt Backer: "Landlocked" for the albumIs That All? ; "The Impulse Man", "Oh No Don't Cry", and "Once in a While" for the album The Impulse Man ; and "Assiduous Polygamy" and "I'm No Fool" for the album Idle Hands. In 2019 he released a self-produced EP, That’s Why I Surf, on Bandcamp. In 2020 the independent music website Divide & Conquer interviewed Worcester about his music, his work with Backer and The Dog's Breakfast, and the connections between comics and popular music.
