Honorary & Retired staff

Professor David Looseley

Emeritus Professor of Contemporary French Culture

0113 343 3479/80

Biography

David was born and educated in South-East London. Graduating from the University of Exeter in 1971 in French (with English), he obtained a Masters in 1974 for work on Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir, and a doctorate in 1982 on the 20th-century dramatist Armand Salacrou. He began his teaching career at the University of Dijon, then took up successive posts at the Universities of Exeter, Huddersfield and Bradford, before coming to Leeds in 1994, where he taught for fifteen years and is now an active emeritus researcher and writer. He is also Associate Fellow of the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, University of Warwick (2010-2013) and an honorary Research Fellow at the University of Bristol (2012-2013). He has been visiting professor at the Universities of Strasbourg, France (2009) and Complutense, Madrid (Erasmus, 2010) and visiting research scholar at the Remarque Institute, New York University (2010). In May 2012, he returns to Complutense to take up a visiting professorship funded by the Spanish government.

In 2005 he established the Popular Cultures Research Network, today an international, interdisciplinary community of researchers, postgraduates and practitioners. In 2010, he was decorated by the French government for services to French culture, becoming Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques.

Research

David's research concerns the contemporary history of cultural practices, policies and institutions, in particular popular culture. Interdisciplinary in scope, it combines historical and political perspectives with an interest in the discourses and cultural debates such practices, policies and institutions engender. He has written extensively in these fields, on such topics as contemporary popular music, the Nancy Theatre Festival, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, postcolonial approaches to cultural policy, youth culture, and the social and cultural theorist Antoine Hennion. He also writes on modern languages, the humanities and the 'impact' agenda.

He is currently writing a cultural history of Édith Piaf (contracted to Liverpool University Press) analysing her accreted cultural meanings from the 1930s to the present: the ways in which her status as singing star has been variously interpreted and used both in France and the Anglophone world. In addition, he is working on a comparative study of the popular in French and UK cultural policies and on a chapter on cultural policy for a book evaluating the Sarkozy presidency (edited by Gino Raymond).

He has been invited to speak about his research in a variety of countries including France (most recently at the Sorbonne, April 2012), Spain, Norway and Denmark and his work appears on French, cultural policy and cultural studies syllabuses in higher education institutions throughout the world. His research expertise has been called upon by various public bodies, including the Prince's Teaching Institute (March 2012), the French Music Bureau and the BBC. He has appeared in a number of radio or TV programmes at home and abroad. He is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Cultural Policy and Thélème, Revista Complutense de Estudios Franceses and on the advisory boards of French Cultural Studies and the French popular music journal Volume Copyright. He referees for these and a number of other scholarly journals.  

Books

(Ed.) Policy and the Popular, Abingdon: Routledge, 2012.

(Ed). With Diana Holmes, Imagining the Popular in Contemporary French Culture, Manchester: Manchester University of Press (in press 2012).

Popular Music in Contemporary France: Authenticity, Politics, Debate (Berg, 2003) (hardback and paperback) and part-funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board.

The Politics of Fun: Cultural Policy and Debate in Contemporary France (Berg, 1995 (reprinted in paperback 1997)), part-funded by the Leverhulme Trust;

A Search for Commitment: The Theatre of Armand Salacrou (University of Exeter Publications, 1985).

 

Selected recent chapters and articles

Chapters

'Looking Forward, Looking Back: Alternative Models of Arts Policy in France and Britain', in N. Lokka and G. Vestheim (eds), KulturRikets Tilstand 2011, Oslo: Hogskolen i Telemark, 2012, pp.17-23.

'Speaking of impact...  Languages and the Utility of the Humanities', in E. Belfiore and A. Upchurch (eds), Humanities in the Twenty-first Century: beyond utility and markets, Basingstoke: Palgrave (forthcoming 2012).

'La Politique culturelle du Royaume-Uni', in P. Poirrier (ed.), La Culture comme politique publique. Essais d'histoire comparée. De 1945 à nos jours, Paris: La Documentation Française/Ministère de la Culture, 2011, pp.389-409.

'Popular Culture, the Final Frontier: How Far Should we Boldly Go?', in P. Lane and M. Worton (eds), French Studies in and for the Twenty-First Century. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011, pp.184-94.

'Making History: French Popular Music and the Notion of the Popular', in B. Lebrun and J. Lovecy (eds), Une et indivisible? Plural Identities in Modern France, Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2010, pp.127-40.

Articles

'Democratising the popular: the case of pop music in France and Britain', International Journal of Cultural Policy, special issue 'Culture and Democracy, ed. G. Vestheim, forthcoming 2012/13

'Making an "impact": Some personal reflections on the Humanities in the UK'. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, vol. 10 (February 2011), pp.9-18.

'Notions of popular culture in cultural policy: a comparative history of France and Britain', International Journal of Cultural Policy, special issue 'Policy and the Popular', ed D.L Looseley, vol. 17 September 2011, pp. 365-79.

Translations into English

Nights of Wrath (translation of A. Salacrou's play, Les Nuits de la colère), staged by HTR at the Greenwich Theatre, New York, 2005.

Araberlin (translation of Jalila Baccar's play, Araberlin, in Four Plays from North Africa, ed. and introduced by Marvin Carlson, New York: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications, 2008.