Sometime between 9/11, the 2008 financial crash, and the climate crisis, culture got weird.

“The late twentieth-century culture was defined by cynicism and irony, a sense that history, for better or worse, had ended, that all there was the here and now,” says Timotheus Vermeulen.

“But now, amid socio-economic and environmental turmoil, filmmakers, musicians, and writers suddenly showed a proclivity towards sincerity, naivety, hope, and even utopianism: ‘quirky’ cinema, the new folk, the new sincerity.”

A professor of media, culture, and society at the University of Oslo and a visiting scholar in art history at Harvard University, Dr. Vermeulen will consider this cultural shift in his free public lecture, entitled “Metamodernism in three figures: metaxy, parafiction, and depthiness,” at 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 10, in the SoCA Armouries’ Performance Hall.

The event is the Humanities Research Group’s final guest lecture of the academic year and will be followed by a question-and-answer session.

Vermeulen’s Windsor talk comes just days after presenting on a cruise ship with DJ and music producer Diplo and soccer star Megan Rapinoe at the four-day Summit at Sea, billed as “the summit community of thinkers, doers, and dreamers immersed in limitless possibilities.”

He has written extensively on contemporary art, screen media and culture. His research on metamodernism has been translated into multiple languages, inspired numerous conferences, special issues, and exhibits, and is cited widely. Together with television presenter Gia Milinovich, he hosts the ideas podcast The Cluster F Theory.