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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 critical theory. 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.
Trained in general literature (PhD Ghent University, Belgium, 2006), Bru began his career studying theorists and philosophers who drew on particular 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 art works, practices and discourses, came to focus on manifestations of 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 
'Globalising the 20th and 21st Century Avant-Gardes'. Keynote at the conference 'Paradoxes of Progress', at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, March 2020.
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twentieth and twenty-first-century forms of avant-gardism. Bru has also invested a lot in the promotion of studying 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.
Bru’s scholarly work, more about which can be found on this site, has appeared (in translation) 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. In 2008 Bru helped found the trilingual (English, French, German) and horizontally structured 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. Bru is active in many other avant-garde and experimental arts-inflected research initiatives (journals, book series, research projects, centers). He 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, may well be in peril. |
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