FTDM Professor Kylo-Patrick Hart Explores Celebrity Culture in New Book

Limelight CoverFTDM professor Kylo-Patrick Hart’s new book, the edited collection Living in the Limelight: Dynamics of the Celebrity Experience, has just been published. To enable readers to grasp the cumulative complexity of contemporary celebrity culture, its sixteen chapters explore noteworthy dynamics of the celebrity experience in recent centuries and up to the present day. In doing so, they explicitly analyze ever-changing phenomena of relevance to celebrity culture, the importance and impact of fans and fandom(s), and the various pleasures and pitfalls that celebrities regularly encounter. Professor Hart’s own chapter in the collection is “Trapped by Celebrity Status and Dead Too Soon: Aspirational Limitations and the Career Trajectories of Marilyn Monroe and Jim Morrison.” The book’s additional chapters include “More Than a Text: On the Affective Relation between Lady Gaga and Her Fans,” “To Be Seen or Not to Be Seen: Narcissistic Tendencies among Bloggers,” “When Did Darth Vader Turn Cuddly? Phenomenology and Fandom,” and “There Will Be Blood: The Darker Side of K-Pop Fandom.”