is professor of social and cultural philosophy at the University of Groningen. He studies the consequences of globalization for everyday culture, urban culture, national identity and national politics and citizenship. Between 1998 and 2002, he was a special professor of pop music at the University of Amsterdam. He published books on modern urban culture and development (his 1998 dissertation Een drempelwereld, ‘A Threshold World’), on pop music and popular culture (Kritische massa, ‘Critical Mass’, 1994), and on globalization and culture (De nieuwe wanorde, ‘The New Disorder’, 2006). In 2008, he wrote a sensational and controversial philosophical pamphlet on the consequences of neoliberal New Public Management for academic culture and the organization of academic education and research. Boomkens has been a member of the Council for Culture, the advisory council on arts and culture of the Dutch government, since 2006. He is also the editor of a book series on knowledge, politics and public opinion with Van Gennep Publishers in Amsterdam. He is currently working on a book on the influence of new media on present-day urban culture (in English) and on an introduction to cultural philosophy (in Dutch). In Nexus 27, he published a polemic carried on with Roger Scruton.