Owen Hatherley is a freelance writer on political aesthetics, based in south-east London. He is the author of four books, Militant Modernism (Zero, 2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010), Uncommon, an essay on the British pop group Pulp (Zero 2011) and A New Kind of Bleak (Verso, 2012). He received his PhD for a thesis on Americanism in the Weimar Republic and the early USSR in 2011.