This lecture is part of the Hands on History series.
‘The return of the strong man’ is a frequent topic in today’s media. Broadsheets decry people’s celebration of authoritarians like Putin, Erdogan and Trump, who cleverly style their virility. Even conventional leadership is thought to require charismatic celebrity as demonstrated by Obama, Blair and Schröder. Yet one of the world’s most powerful leaders is ‘Mutti Merkel’ – an ‘anticelebrity’. My objective during the C²DH Fellowship is to use this novel concept of anticelebrity to study the transnational interactions between politics and mass media in modern history, which would build on my doctoral expertise and provide a new direction towards a larger post-doctoral project.
Betto Van Waarden (KU Leuven) is a visiting researcher at the C²DH during the summer 2019.