Arts in society is a platform for inspiring and thought provoking contributions that aim to boost discussions on the societal functions of art in its manifold forms. It is hosted by staff, students and alumni of the department of Arts, Culture & Media and Art History at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
For more information, you can get in to contact with us.
Who is who in Arts in Society Groningen?
Beate Peter
Johan Kolsteeg
As a musicologist I worked in the fields of contemporary and classical music. After that, I started work in arts education and then decided to enter academia. My main topics are organising and communicating in the arts and cultural democracy, a field that looks at how arts and can contribute to democratic debates, specifically discussing regionalisation and populism. Also, I am the director of studies of the Research Master Cultural Leadership.
Quirijn van den Hoogen
Dan Padure
“Dan Padure is a teaching assistant and Research Master’s student at the University of Groningen. His academic interests span the fields of cultural sociology, cognitive musicology, strategic arts management, and branding.
Currently, Dan’s Master’s thesis synthesizes his diverse interests by exploring audio branding as a strategic tool for organisations to convey identity and differentiate themselves. His research investigates how music is intentionally crafted to contribute to meaning-making through music—and how these, in turn, shape brand perception. Outside academia, Dan is actively involved in the production of music festivals and is a musician himself.”
Elizabeth Pinilla Duarte
Elizabeth works as a lecturer in Sociology of the Arts and supervises BA’s and MA’s theses. Her Ph.D research is about Twitter narratives of social mobilization, and she specializes in the study of metaphors as mechanisms of cultural cognition, and in the socio-cultural and aesthetic construction of human practices.
Femke Vandenberg
Femke Vandenberg is an Assistant Professor of Audience Research at the University of Groningen. As a cultural sociologist, her research focuses on music consumption, the live music experience for various cultural audiences, and its capacity to bond and divide people. She is particularly interested in the effect of digitalization on these processes.
Vandenberg attained her PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam, where she investigated the collective potential of live music. Her research has been published in journals such as Cultural Sociology, Symbolic Interaction, and Poetics, addressing topics like livestreamed concerts and the sociocultural dynamics of music events.
Next to this, she is also a board member of the Benelux branch of the international association for the study of popular music (IASPM Benelux) and actively works with stakeholders from the cultural field.
Rudi de Vries
works as a lecturer in Cultural Entrepreneurship, and he supervises Bachelor’s and Master’s theses. He also works for the Faculty of Economics and Business, as a lecturer in International Business. His research interests are on the areas of cultural industries, strategic management, and institutional theories. His PhD Dissertation is about coevolutions in the niche of comics publishers.