Arno van der Hoeven MSc

Lecturer/PhD Candidate

Biographical Note

Arno van der Hoeven is a lecturer and PhD candidate in the Department of Media & Communication at Erasmus University. His PhD research is part of the research project Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity (POPID), a large scale international collaborative research project funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area).

He has studied in Nijmegen, Leuven and Antwerp. In 2009 he graduated cum laude in Communication Science (Radboud University Nijmegen). In his master's thesis (Ga je mee naar het stadion? De identiteit van voetbalfans in een geglobaliseerde samenleving), he studied the identity construction of football fans. The focus of this study was on the tension between the often locally rooted identity of the fans and the international orientation of players, clubs and media.

In 2010, he obtained his master's degree in Sociology from University of Antwerp, graduating with great distinction. His thesis for this master was about the influence of Open Content-licenses on ideas of authorship (Digitaal recombineren als immateriële arbeid. Een sociologische studie naar de betekenis van Creative Commons-licenties in de kunst- en erfgoedsector).

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Arno about his research:

I examine the increasing importance of popular music in contemporary renderings of cultural identity and local and national cultural heritage. For example, in 2012 the Centraal Museum Utrecht dedicated an exhibition to punk. This demonstrates how the musical rebels of the past now have become museum pieces and are cherished as cultural heritage.

Drawing upon interviews with bloggers, curators, archivists, DJs and audiences, I examine the various ways by which popular music is remembered and invokes cultural memories. This ranges from the preservation of music artifacts in museum and archives, to online communities commemorating pirate radio stations from the past. Furthermore, in a recently published article I focus on how the sounds of subcultural genres are preserved at nostalgic dance parties.

In my research I find that the places where popular music is consumed are pivotal in the construction of popular music heritage and cultural identity. Local museums and archives present how global phenomena such as punk and rock ’n ’roll resounded into specific localities. In my dissertation I aim to explain what these cultural memories mean to local communities and the people who grew up with these sounds.