Sascha Bru is a Belgian scholar of Russian and Romanian descent. He is a professor at the Arts Faculty of the University of Leuven – a stone's throw away from Brussels – where he teaches general and comparative literature. For two decades now his research has focused mainly on manifestations of the avant-garde, that is on radically experimental and socially engaged practices across art forms and media.
Bru began his career studying theorists and philosophers who drew on instances of the avant-garde to forward pronouncements on the general state of art and aesthetics. Increasingly, his work thereafter, while always wedding theoretical speculation with analyses of concrete works, practices and discourses, came to focus on the avant-garde itself, first on the so-called historic avant-garde (cubism, futurism, expressionism, Dada, surrealism, constructivism) and in recent years also on later twentieth and twenty-first-century forms of avant-gardism. |
Bru’s scholarly work, more about which can be found on this site, has appeared in English, French, German, Dutch, Icelandic, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, and Chinese. It has been reviewed in, among others, Art History, London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Modernism/Modernity, Leonardo, Konsthistorisk Tydskrift, the Modernist Review, and The European Legacy. He is a frequently invited (keynote) speaker both in parts of the English speaking world (UK, USA and Australia) and in the multilingual patchwork called Europe.
Bru has also invested a lot in the promotion of the international study of the avant-garde, emphasizing the needs to question the West-centric gaze and to keep developing new approaches to the avant-garde's critical practices. In 2008 he was a founder of the horizontally structured and trilingual (English, French, German) European Network of Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM), which since has brought together over 2000 humanities scholars from about forty countries to discuss advances in the study of the avant-garde. He is active as well in many other avant-garde and experimental arts-inflected research initiatives (journals, book series, research projects, centers). Bru also engages in public debate on the key role of avant-garde practitioners today, because a culture that fails to take critical note of its avant-garde, that is a culture only interested in reproducing itself, is in peril today. |
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