Tessa Vannieuwenhuyze ist aka-Fellow 2026
Researchers Who Care Too Much: Fandom as a Methodology
Lesekreis im Sonderzahl Verlag, Mommsengasse 2, 1040 Wien
June 3, 2026, 6:00 p.m.
Can one care too much as a researcher? As noted by fan studies scholar Matthew Hills, there are striking parallels between the figure of the fan—who can produce extensive knowledge about their object of devotion–and the passionate scholar. This AKA-Lesekreis with Tessa Vannieuwenhuyze takes that question as a point of departure to reflect on fandom not only as an object of study, but as a mode of inquiry. As a shared starting point, we will read the introduction to the edited collection Fandom as a Methodology. A Sourcebook for Artists and Writers by Catherine Grant & Kate Random Love (MIT Press 2019). From there, the session opens onto broader questions of proximity to our objects of study: what fandom, as a lens, can render legible about forms of excessive, desirous (over)attachment, and how these shape our engagements with (media) texts. Participants are invited to reflect upon their own closeness to the materials that they work with. How might fandom operate as a critical and generative toolbox? And what are the blind spots or risks such proximity might entail?
link to the text (if the link is expired contact us for the text; we are reading the introduction, p. 1-22)
If required, we can run the event in a hybrid format. In that case, please email us by 1 June at the latest at: peter.clar@univie.ac.at
The Archontically Performed Persona across Popular Music & Contemporary Performing Arts
Lecture: University of Applied Arts Vienna, Seminarraum 21, Vordere Zollamtsstraße 7, 4.OG, 1030 Wien
June 10, 2026, 6:00 p.m.
What is at stake when David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust is understood as a character rather than a persona, despite its frequent citation as a paradigmatic example of persona in popular music? And how does persona equally come into play when American pop star Lana Del Rey pushes back against having a persona, stating it is “not a David Bowie thing”? In our current context of rapidly evolving online cultures, persona appears to be everywhere. “The persona is the message”, art writer Dean Kissick boldly declared in 2021 in a two-part column titled Persona for Spike Art Magazine. It is woven into the fabric of our mediated realities, shaping how we engage with the world and with one another. Increasingly used in public discourse to describe the condition of perpetually staging oneself in the public eye, the term nonetheless remains tightly connected to its origins in the theatrical mask and artistic practice more broadly.
This lecture sets out to present a renegotiation of the concept of persona in music, loosening it from its conventional grounding in role-playing and rethinking it along two intertwined axes: as curated rather than created, and as archontically performed. This approach reassembles an understanding of persona that goes beyond a singular, essential expression of identity, and instead develops it as a particularly apt lens through which to gain insight into the intensifying interstice of hybrid practices that traverse the stages of contemporary performing arts and pop music.
Tessa Vannieuwenhuyze is a performance studies scholar affiliated with the research groups Cultural Studies KU Leuven and S:PAM (Studies in Performing Arts and Media) at Ghent University, where she also teaches media archaeology of visual strategies. In her doctoral dissertation project, she renegotiated the concept of persona across popular music and contemporary performing arts through the methodological lens of fandom. She currently threads this research trajectory into an exploration of how pop music (concert) practices permeate into contemporary performance contexts, through the notion of ‚trackmaturgy‘. As a dramaturge, Tessa has been charting her practice through her collaboration with oester, a music-based transdisciplinary platform for encounters across sound, performance, and visual arts.