Jérémy Richard

Personal Information

  • 04/2026 – ongoing: Doctoral Researcher at the Max-Weber-Kolleg, University of Erfurt 
  • 10/2025 – 03/2026: Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Max-Weber-Kolleg, University of Erfurt
  • 2023 – 2024: Affiliated Researcher, Institut für Kulturwissenschaften, University of Leipzig 
  • 2022 – 2024: M.Sc. in Sociology, Université de Montréal (thesis: Richard Wagner and Cultural Pessimism in the 19th Century) 
  • 2023 – ongoing: Complementary Diploma in German Studies, Canadian Centre for German and European Studies (CCGES), Université de Montréal 
  • 2019 – 2022: B.A. in Political Science and Philosophy, Université de Montréal 

Research Project

Working title: In the Shadow of Genius: On the Fan Reception of Richard Wagner and Kanye West

funded by the Jutta Heidemann Stiftung

This doctoral project examines how audiences relate to artists whose public reception combines strong admiration with significant controversy. Though scholars have long set aside the category of "genius," it continues to surface in public debate around such figures — a recurring tension that has rarely been studied systematically.

Drawing on qualitative interviews, ethnographic fieldwork at concert venues and festivals, and documentary analysis, the project asks how such admiration is expressed, discussed, and made sense of by the people who hold it. Its central question: how do audiences sustain admiration for controversial artists, and what kinds of reasoning do they draw on to do so?

The comparative pairing of Wagner and West is designed to trace both continuities and differences in these patterns of reasoning across two very different cultural worlds. Theoretically, the project combines a historical sociology of genius as a distinctive social category, a cultural approach to its mythologies, and an attention to the everyday reasoning people use to justify their commitments and preferences.

Its approach is interpretative rather than evaluative: the aim is not to absolve or condemn, but to understand how audiences navigate admiration under complex circumstances in everyday life.