Scholars:
Bruce Johnson (University of Turku):
My interest in popular culture is as a way of tracing cultural
history since the medieval period, and in particular through the
field of acoustics: the role of sound in the confrontations which
generated modernity as mapped through such demarcations as class,
gender, nation state, race. This work involves such areas as
literacy and literature as an information economy competing with
sound, sound and visual technologies, the acoustics of the modern
city, and music. Particular areas of research within this field
include the history of the connections between music and
violence, popular music and sexuality, regional popular musics
especially jazz.
Janne Mäkelä (University of Helsinki):
Dr Janne Mäkelä is Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Researcher in
the European Area and Cultural Studies of the Renvall Institute,
University of Helsinki. He is also adjunct professor (docent)
of history of popular culture in Cultural History, University of
Turku, where he completed his PhD in 2002. Mäkelä has written on
issues of popular culture, pop music and
stardom. His book John Lennon Imagined: Cultural History of a
Rock Star (Peter Lang, New York) was published in 2004. He is
currently writing a book on pursuits of international fame in
Finnish popular music from the early 1960s to the late 1990s. As
to his hobbies, Mäkelä is interested in crime (fiction only) and
making Balkanese/Turkish-influenced popular music. For more, see
http://www.helsinki.fi/hum/renvall/eka/staff_makela.html
More scholars to be announced!
Projects:
The Starnet: Changing Discourses of Popular Music Stardom
(funded by the Academy of Finland, 2005-2008)
The Starnet project deals with the relationship between
the
star phenomenon and popular music. The main questions of the
project are: How is popular music stardom constructed at specific
historical moments? What kind of meanings popular music stars
incorporate? Stardom is characterised by different media-oriented
public actions which form a web-like texture. The project calls
this discursion the starnet. In order to understand traditions
and changes in this discursion, as well as the triumph of stardom
in the latter part of twentieth-century, the project produces
three studies. Docent Kari Kallioniemi examines the
democratization of eccentricism in British stardom and popular
music. MA Kimi Kärki focuses on Anglo-American stage designing
and the multifaceted relationship between “stadium rock stardom”
and technology. Dr Janne Mäkelä explores how Finland’s quest for
international popular music stardom in the late twentieth-century
was connected to globalisation processes and national identity.
Kallioniemi and Mäkelä have acquired partial funding for their
sub-projects.
More projects to be announced!
