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Professor in General Literature at KU Leuven
Sascha Bru is professor in general literature. A Belgian scholar of Russian and Romanian descent, he has a strong interest in European culture, and in European avant-garde culture in particular.
Avant-garde culture in the broadest sense denotes all cultural practices that combine experimentation with a radical intent to re-imagine the world. Such practices can be found in many areas of culture (philosophy, science, politics, everyday life, etc.), yet Bru is particularly drawn to their manifestations within the arts—be it in literature or the visual arts, in architecture or the performance arts. Typical of avant-garde artistic practices is that they seem off or out of joint to most contemporaries and that their value only shows itself at a later date. Classic instances include the modernist movements of cubism, futurism, expressionism, Dadaism, surrealism and constructivism, to which Bru has devoted several studies. Bru also reflects on later twentieth-century avant-garde practices and on our current, twenty-first-century moment, in which almost everything seems off or out of joint. Whether there can still be talk of avant-garde art today is for that reason a matter of debate. It is important to wage this debate, however, because a culture without an avant-garde, that is, a culture that can no longer imagine itself differently and that can only reproduce itself, may well be in peril.
Bru’s work serves a double purpose. On the one hand, it aims to help disclose the history of European avant-garde practices in the arts within a global setting so that we come to better understand their past: their richness, complexity and conditions of possibility. On the other hand, Bru is interested in facets of avant-garde culture which we have not yet fully come to terms with and which could still inform cultural practice today or in the future.
Bru is a founder and former chair of the trilingual (French, German, English) European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM), which biennially convenes at a European university to discuss research on modernist and avant-gardes practices in all the disciplines of the humanities. Bru acts as supervisor of various research projects in his field, as a director of the MDRN research lab, as head of the Theory and Cultural Studies Research Group, and as a member the university’s Culture, Art and Heritage Committee.