Lawrence Grossberg

Lawrence Grossberg is an American scholar of cultural studies. He helped introduce and define cultural studies—an interdisciplinary intellectual study of the intersections of culture and power through practices of contextuality, complexity, and contingency—into the U.S. He is widely known for his research in the philosophy of communication and cultural theory.

His work focuses on the relations of popular and political cultures. He was among the first academic intellectuals to take seriously the challenges of understanding the relations of popular music and post-war youth cultures. His argument that popular music worked through uniquely “affective” forms of communication—and his attempts to theorize affect—helped open the concept to broader and more rigorous study and debate.

Subsequently, he produced a series of cultural studies that attempt to offer better stories about the changing political culture of the U.S. since the 1960s. They follow the struggles among various conservative, reactionary, and progressive political movements, and the affective logics driving them, to construct livable stories around crises of modernity.