معرفی
Prof. Dr. habil. Fernand Hörner serves as Professor of Cultural Studies at Hochschule Düsseldorf within the Faculty of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies. He holds multiple significant leadership positions including Director of the Center for Digitalization and Digitality (Zentrum für Digitalisierung und Digitalität), Internationalization Commissioner, and Program Director of the MA Transforming Digitality. Additionally, he serves as Deputy Director of the Department of Media and Interaction at the Doctoral College of Universities of Applied Sciences NRW and as Speaker of the Working Group on Popular Culture and Media in the Society for Media Science. He is also the co-founder and co-editor of the Song Lexicon (Songlexikon).
Prof. Hörner's research focuses on interdisciplinary analysis of popular culture, particularly music videos, examining the intersection of digital transformation and musical expression. His work explores voice as a semantic and aesthetic phenomenon, content analysis of user comments in digital spaces, and the theoretical frameworks for understanding media convergence. His methodological approach combines cultural theory, discourse analysis, and semiotics to investigate how popular culture forms meaning across different media platforms.
His scholarly output reveals a consistent trajectory from his early work on dandyism and cultural identity toward contemporary digital culture and media convergence. The most recent publications demonstrate increasing focus on digital reception patterns, social media phenomena, and the transformation of musical culture in the digital age. His work maintains a strong theoretical foundation while engaging with contemporary cultural phenomena from music videos to viral social media gestures.
Prof. Hörner has developed significant research infrastructure through the Song Lexicon project, which contains approximately 300 scholarly analyses of songs across various genres since the beginning of sound recording. This resource examines songs through multiple dimensions including historical context, cultural significance, reception history, and audiovisual presentation.
His academic journey includes a habilitation at the University of Basel (2019), professorship at HSD since 2012, previous positions at Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, and doctoral work on dandyism completed in 2007. His scholarly contributions span musicology, cultural studies, media theory, and digital humanities with particular attention to the interplay between visual and auditory elements in contemporary media culture.
