dr. (Niels) N van Poecke

Profile

Niels van Poecke (1983) is a lecturer in Aesthetics and Sociology of Arts and Culture at the Department of Arts and Culture Studies. As of January 2018 he in addition works as Double Degree and Events coordinator for the Rotterdam Arts and Sciences Lab (RASL).

Niels van Poecke studied Arts and Culture studies (BA, 2004), Sociology of Arts and Culture (MA, 2005), and Philosophy of the Social Sciences (MA, 2007) at Erasmus University Rotterdam. After obtaining his master’s degree in 2007, he worked as a programme maker at the Studium Generale of Erasmus University until 2011, where he organized academic and cultural events for students and the general public. During his studies, he has combined his love for popular culture with an interest for sociology and philosophy, culminating in a MA thesis on Americana music (2005) and a MA thesis on blues music in connection to Greek tragedy and Nietzschean philosophy (2007). In November 2017, he completed his doctoral thesis on indie-folk music and the search for authenticity in contemporary modernity. He has won various awards for his work, including the ‘National Popscriptie Prijs’ (2007) and the Young Scholar Award at the 2016 International Congress of Aesthetics in Seoul, South-Korea.  

His fields of interest include sociology of arts and culture (specifically the sociology of taste and the sociology of self-identity), (contemporary) aesthetics, (contemporary) art, practice theory, popular culture, and contemporary manifestations of the tragic. He currently works on a research project on the relationship between narrative identity, culture and (coping with) stress.