Lawrence Grossberg

Template:Short description 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.

Biography

Lawrence Grossberg was born on December 3, 1947. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in an upwardly mobile, second-generation immigrant Jewish family, suffering from a congenital orthopedic disability. He attended Stuyvesant High School. In 1968 he graduated summa cum laude in history and philosophy from the University of Rochester, where he studied with Hayden White, Richard Taylor, and Lewis Beck. Afterwards, he studied with Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, England.

After two years of traveling through Europe with Les Treteaux Libres, a French-speaking theater company, Grossberg returned to the United States for doctoral studies at the Institute of Communications Research, with James W. Carey, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in Communication Research in 1976. His dissertation was an attempt to bring together Martin Heidegger's phenomenology and the work of key cultural studies figures.

Grossberg taught briefly at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana (1975‒1976) before returning to the University of Illinois as Assistant Professor of Speech Communication. At the University of Illinois, he helped found the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. He moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1994 as the Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies, where he also held appointments in American Studies, Anthropology, and Geography. There he helped establish the University Program in Cultural Studies. He retired as Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Communication in 2022.

Grossberg has directed sixty doctoral students. He has received numerous honors and awards for scholarship, teaching, and mentorship. He has published ten books and more than 250 essays and interviews, and has edited eleven books.

Internationally, he is recognized as one of the leading figures in cultural studies. He edited the major international journal Cultural Studies for thirty years (1990‒2019). He helped found the Association for Cultural Studies. His work has been published (both in translation and original work) in 20 languages and he has lectured all over the world.

In 1988, Grossberg married Barbara Anne Claypole White and in 1994, their son, Zachariah Nigel Claypole White was born (with Stuart Hall as one of his godparents). Barbara is novelist; Zachariah is a poet and short-story writer.