University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
Tuesday 14th – Wednesday 15th July 2009

This conference aims to illuminate a set of tastes, institutions and social practices associated primarily with the aspirational middle class in the early to mid-twentieth century, to understand the relationship between elite, popular and 'intermediate' cultural production. The emergence of middlebrow cultural products in the decades following the First World War was, primarily, a result of technical innovations in printing, distribution, recording, and broadcasting. This relates directly to trends in our own time, since the internet has not only resulted in a vast renaissance of textual production, but has also generated new internationalised audiences and interpretive communities which echo the middlebrow cultural formations of the early twentieth century. Examples include electronic book clubs, new bohemian web magazines, and diaries and blogs which recall the Mass Observation project.

The conference will include:
 a special session on resources for researching the middlebrow
 dinner at the famous Glasgow art deco restaurant 'Rogano'
 a visit to the Britannia Panoptican Music Hall (not normally open to the public)

The Middlebrow Network is a transatlantic interdisciplinary project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. For more information or to register for the conference go to www.middlebrow-network.com or email Erica Brown at middlebrow@hotmail.co.uk.