About
The Celebrity Culture Club brings together academics, those who could broadly be described as working in the media, and interested members of the general public, to gossip about analyse the important issues of the day relating to celebrity culture.
Celebrity is one of the major economic drivers of media production. Whether or not we think of ourselves as interested in celebrity culture, it’s such an integral part of the media culture that surrounds us that we are inevitably touched by the ideas that circulate in it. It’s important that we examine celebrity culture when it so totally permeates our everyday life and has so much to tell us about the wider values of the society we live in.
By bringing together academics and interested audiences with those who actually make the media which contributes to celebrity culture, the Celebrity Culture Club helps to reframe popular debates around celebrity, bringing more critical thinking about gender, race and class into our ideas about celebrity, at the point of both production and consumption. We take academic research out to media and creative industry workplaces, and have held events at the BBC, South by South West festival, Allbright Academy, the offices of creative agency, Mr President and many other places where the celebrity-adjacent gather.
Work with us:
We are available for public speaking, consultancy and media comment on a range of topics related to celebrity and the politics of popular culture. Email HYelin [at] brookes [dot] ac [dot] uk.
The Celebrity Culture Club is made possible by our collaborators. These are experts from a wide range of media fields and locations around the globe who have shared their expertise and insight, helped to make our events happen, and who continue as part of an ongoing network that shares reciprocal insights about celebrity culture and how we can make conversations about celebrity into opportunities for social critique.
Dr Hannah Yelin
The Celebrity Culture Club is hosted by Dr Hannah Yelin, a Reader in Gender, Media, and Culture at Oxford Brookes University. Before returning to academia, Hannah had a 12 year award-winning career working with advertising agencies and media organisations such as the BBC, Global Radio and UKTV. She researches the politics of visibility, the spaces afforded to women who live in public to represent themselves, the way these are proscribed or circumscribed, and what this can tell us about the status of women in society. Her book Celebrity Memoir: from Ghostwriting to Gender Politics (Palgrave, 2020) explores the gender (and class, and racial) politics of celebrity memoir. Her next book will examine how teenage girls feel about the treatment of women in the public eye and how this interacts with their own imagined futures. She is the Director of Cultures of Digital Hate and the Chair of the Creative Industries Research and Innovation Network (CIRIN).
collaborators
