Arts & Media Archaeology

On the Popular and Some Other Historiographic Misunderstandings

11 March 2024 - Karel Vanhaesebrouck

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Location: S.S209 ARIA attic, Lange Sint-Annastraat 7, 2000 Antwerp

​Time: 14h30-17h, unless communicated otherwise

​Target audience: junior academic and artistic researchers

The notion of popular culture, or more generally the popular, is a term difficult to coin and is often confused with mass entertainment. The popular, however, has a specific history which is closely connected to the history of cultural performance. This history often developed outside of official sources, as it is intrinsically linked to counter-hegemonic positions. In his lecture, Karel Vanhaesebrouck will try to untangle this complex, polysemic term focusing on specific practices of cultural representation.

Preparatory reading:
  1. Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular”, in People’s History and Socialist Theory, edited by Raphael Samuel, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2016, pp. 227-240. 
About Karel Vanhaesebrouck

Karel Vanhaesebrouck is a professor and chair of theatre studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he teaches courses in the MA program “Arts du spectacle vivant” and acts as a director of the research centre CiASp | Centre de recherche en Cinéma et Arts du Spectacle. He also works as a theory lecturer at the Brussel-based film and theatre school RITCS, the Royal Institute of Theatre, Cinema and Sound of the Erasmus University College, where he teaches courses in theatre history and cultural history. He has published widely on early modern theatre history in France, England and the Netherlands, but also on contemporary European theatre practices.