Glad to meet you
I'm Giselinde professor of cultural sociology
I am a Dutch sociologist who works at KU Leuven University in Leuven, Belgium. In my research and teaching, I look at the social shaping and consequences of cultural standards and tastes, often from a comparative perspective.
Over the years, I have done research on a range of topics that I like to summarize as “frivolous things with serious consequences”, such as beauty, humor, fashion, television, memes, sexuality, cycling, translation, literature and film.
Across these topics, I have tried to understand how and why people learn what is good or bad, beautiful or ugly, valuable or worthless, funny or unfunny, interesting or boring. I also try to understand the consequences of such standards for social inequalities, identities and interactions. For instance, what happens when people cannot share humor? Or when people find something ugly that you consider exquisitely beautiful? Why do people see their tastes and standards as superior, to the point that they try to impose them on others? What happens when products produced to cater to one particular group moves across national borders?
I received my Master’s degree in cultural anthropology from Utrecht University (1995) and a PhD in sociology from the University of Amsterdam (2001).
Since then I have worked at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (USA), Erasmus University Rotterdam, and again the University of Amsterdam before moving to Leuven in 2019.
I have published widely in the fields of cultural sociology, media studies, and cultural globalization and transnational culture. An overview of my publications can be found here. Much of this research is comparative: I have done research in several European countries (the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy and Poland) as well as the US, China and Hong Kong, and I have also been involved with ‘transnational’ research not confined to a single country.
Currently, I am the principal investigator of a large comparative project that looks at beauty and inequality in five global cities on four continents.
I work with PhD researchers and postdocs on various topics in the broadly defined field of comparative cultural sociology (see the list on my CV). I teach an MA-leve course on culture and inequality at KU Leuven.
In addition to my academic publications, I occasionally publish for wider audiences, mostly in Dutch. I also make and curate a podcast on culture & inequality, which is linked to the course I teach at KU Leuven. I share my non- or less academic exploits on this site.