Martin Butler
Martin Butler
Biography
Martin Butler is Professor of "American Studies: Literature and Culture" and Vice Director of the Research Centre "Genealogy of the Present" at the University of Oldenburg. After studying the subjects of English and social sciences at the University of Duisburg, he completed his doctorate at the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2007 with a thesis on the songs of American folk singer Woody Guthrie. From 2014 to 2019, he was spokesperson for the "Cultures of Participation" doctoral programme, and since 2016 he has been involved in the "Migration Society Border Formations" doctoral programme (as spokesperson since 2019). He researches and publishes in particular on popular cultures in the North American and inter-American context, especially on popular music, on figures, forms and media of cultural mobility as well as on discourses and practices of participation in the so-called Web 2.0.
Selected publications
"The Future that Never Was: Analogue Nostalgia and the Ambivalent Astronaut in the Songs of Man... or Astro-man?" 'We are all astronauts'. The Image of the Space Traveller in Arts and Media. Edited by Henry Keazor. Berlin: Neofelis Verlag 2019. 211-224.
"Promises of Transparency, Promises of Participation: On the Ambivalent Rhetoric of the Occupy-Movement." Contested Transparencies - Critique of Ideology, the Public Sphere and Social Change: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Edited by Stefan Berger and Dimitrij Owetschkin. London: Palgrave Macmillan 2019. 199-210.
"Of Shreds, Spoofs, and Participatory Cultures: Parodies of Popular Music Video Clips in Web 2.0 Contexts." The Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Humour. Edited by Nicolas Baxter-Moore and Thomas M. Kitts. New York: Routledge 2019. 321-328.
"Practices of Diagnosticising the Singer/Songwriter Figure: On Tom Morello's Staging of Himself and Others." Contemporary Diagnoses: Cultural Forms of Social Self-Problematisation in the Modern Age. Edited by Thomas Alkemeyer, Nikolaus Buschmann and Thomas Etzemüller. Bielefeld: transcript, 2019.