European Celebrity in Historical Perspective

* Corresponding author: [e-mail].

Launched in March 2010 as an academic journal dedicated to ‘the critical exploration of celebrity’, Celebrity Studies welcomed a range of ‘(inter)disciplinary approaches’ and sought contributors working within a variety of ‘media forms, historical periods and national contexts’. ¹ The journal’s debut reflected a growing scholarly interest in celebrity and it provided academics a forum for advancing the field of celebrity studies. In the two decades preceding the journal’s inaugural issue, scholars of media sociology, film and cultural studies offered valuable conceptual tools for theorising celebrity. In particular, they constructed useful analytical frameworks for examining celebrity’s cultural meanings within both national and transnational contexts, and they formulated compelling strategies for untangling celebrity’s complex relationship to late modernity. ² Despite these inroads, however, researchers paid considerably less attention to how celebrity operated before the second half of the twentieth century. ³ Although celebrity had emerged as a viable theme within historical studies, most notably within the specialised areas of art and theatre history and within the genre of historical biography, few area studies scholars historicised celebrity while even fewer historians, it seemed, pursued the study of celebrity at all. ⁴

In his November 2010 contribution to Celebrity Studies, ‘Historicising Celebrity’, and in his 2011 essay for Culture and Social History, ‘Celebrity: Academic “Pseudo-Event”, or a Useful Category for Historians’, Simon Morgan attempted to bridge the divide between area studies experts and historians by advocating for more critical debate regarding the ‘historical uses of “celebrity”’. ⁵ For Morgan, historicising celebrity would challenge a scholarship that often presented celebrity as a product of late modernity and enable scholars to understand the ways in which celebrity functioned as a ‘key driver of the modernisation process’. ⁶ Rather than eschew the application of celebrity theory as anachronistic or anticipate criticism for addressing ‘something so apparently trivial’ as stardom, historians needed, Morgan maintained, to galvanise celebrity as an elucidatory historical concept and to validate its study within the academy. ⁷ By critically engaging celebrity theory and by effectively applying it to the past, historians could demonstrate celebrity’s utility as a driver and as a product of modern consumer culture and they could uncover its instrumental role in expanding the public sphere. ⁸

To achieve these...