Ray B. Browne, 87, of Bowling Green, Ohio, passed away Thursday, October 22, 2009, in Bowling Green, Ohio.
Ray was always one to question convention and authority. As a former professor of English and Literature, he broke academic conventions in the 1960's and 1970's to pioneer the study of popular culture, the study of everyday cultural life. In the process, he helped revolutionize the subject matter that scholars in English, American Studies, Sociology, Radio/ Television/Film, and other disciplines view as acceptable and helped drive the academic study of what most people spend most of their free time pursuing.
Born on January 15, 1922 in Millport, Alabama to Garfield and Annie (Trull) Browne.
He married Alice "Pat" (Matthews) on August 25, 1965 and she survives of Bowling Green.
Also surviving are sons, Glenn and Kevin Browne; daughter, Alicia Browne and three grandchildren.
He fought in World War II in an arullery unit in the European Theater, and then studied in England at the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham for a year after the war ended.
From there, he returned to the U.S. and earned a masters degree in Victorian Literature from Columbia University.
He spent two years teaching at the University of Nebraska in the late 1940's before attending the University of California at Los Angeles, earning a Ph.D. in English and Folklore in 1956.
Mr. Browne taught at the University of Maryland from 1956-1960, and at Purdue University from 1960-1967.
A prodigious scholar, he published dozens of articles and numerous books in his early career.
In 1967, Ray moved to Bowling Green State University, in Bowling Green, Ohio with the express purpose of starting the academic study of popular culture. He was fortunate to have the support of both the dean of his college and the University President at the time. At that point, Mr. Browne's career and the popular culture movement took off.
He founded the Journal of Popular Culture in 1967 and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 1968. These were the first entities of their kind to focus on the study of everyday culture.
From the beginning, Mr. Browne cast his net widely. A perusal of a recent program from the Popular Culture association annual conference includes such subjects as comic books, fashion studies, Stephen King, mystery and detective fiction, children's literature, westerns, rock music, internet culture, sports culture, vampires, world fairs and expositions, food and popular culture, the Civil War, digital culture, Arthurian legends, travel culture, slapstick comedy, romance fiction, motorcycle culture, medical humanities, popular architecture and design, and hundreds of other subjects covering aspects of everyday life. Quite simply, Mr. Browne viewed popular culture as what most people spend most of their life doing.
He founded the Popular Culture Library at BGSU in 1970. The Library now holds 190,000 books and hundreds of thousands of other materials related to the study of popular culture. The repository is perhaps the leading source for popular culture artifacts in the nation.
In 1970 he founded the Popular Culture Association (PCA) to organize and promote the study of popular culture both in the U.S. and internationally. The annual national convention, held since 1971, regularly draws more than 2000 participants.
Browne later founded a sister organization to the PCA, the American Culture Association, to focus solely on American popular culture.
His focus on everyday culture earned him many honors and high visibility in the media. He appeared several times on the CBS Evening News, as well as on the Phil Donahue show, BBC News, and other television programs. He was the subject of a USA Today profile (December 22, 1986), and articles about him appeared in People magazine (July 11, 1977), and Rolling Stones (October 1988). He was quoted hundreds of times in newspapers, including The New York times, The Wall street Journals, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Toledo Blade, and many others.
He was named a Distinguished University Professor at BGSU, the university's highest honor for professors, in 1977.
He worked tirelessly writing books and promoting popular culture studies until just two months before his death.
His lasting impact on academia is of major significance. While at BGSU, he wrote, edited, or co-edited more than 50 book, dozens of articles, a compendium Guide to United States Popular Culture, and hundreds of book reviews. Most universities in The U.S. and many abroad, now teach courses in popular culture (under various names) in departments of English, Sociology, and History. American Studies, Anthropology, and others. Making these courses acceptable to university faculty and administrators, to study of culture of everyday life, is his legacy.
One of the most flattering lines about him, which describes his life and his career perfectly, is from colleague R. Serge Denisoff in a book dedicated many years ago; "To Ray B. Browne, a gentle revolutionary in the ivory tower."
Visitation will be held on Tuesday, (October 27, 2009) from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. at the Holman Funeral Home (334-774-5348) Ozark, Alabama. A Graveside Service will be held Wednesday (October 28, 2009) at 11:00 a.m. at the Woodlawn Memory Gardens in Ozark, Alabama.
Local arrangements are being handled by Dunn Funeral Home, 408 W. Wooster St. (located in the Historical District in Bowling Green).
On-line condolences may be sent to the family by visiting www.dunnfuneralhome.com
Published in Toledo Blade on October 24, 2009∼*He is buried in another location see obit below
Obituary of Ray B. Browne
Mr. Ray B Browne, age 87, of Bowling Green, Ohio, passed away Thursday October 22, 2009, in Bowling Green, Ohio.
Funeral services will be graveside at 11:00 A.M. Wednesday, October 28, 2009, in Woodlawn Memory Gardens. Interment will follow with Holman Funeral Home of Ozark directing. The family will receive friends at the funeral home from 6:00 P. M. until 8:00 P. M. Tuesday evening, October 27, 2009.
Ray was always one to question convention and authority. As a former professor of English and Literature, he broke academic conventions in the 1960's and 1970's to pioneer the study of popular culture, the study of everyday cultural life. In the process, he helped revolutionize the subject matter that scholars in English, American Studies, Sociology, Radio/Television/Film, and other disciplines view as acceptable and helped drive the academic study of what most people spend most of their free time pursuing.
Born on January 15, 1922 in Millport, Alabama to Garfield and Annie (Trull) Browne. He married Alice "Pat" (Matthews) on August 25, 1965 and she survives of Bowling Green. Also surviving are sons, Glenn & Kevin Browne, daughter, Alicia Browne and three grandchildren.
He fought in World War II in an artillery unit in the European Theater, and the studied in England at the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham for a year after the war ended. From there, he returned to the U.S. and earned a masters degree in Victorian Literature from Columbia University. He spent two years teaching at the University of Nebraska in the late 1940's before attending the University of California at Los Angeles, earning a Ph.D. in English and Folklore in 1956.
Mr. Browne taught at the University of Maryland from 1956-1960, and at Purdue University from 1960-1967. A prodigious scholar, he published dozens of articles and numerous books in his early career.
In 1967, Ray moved to Bowling Green State University, in Bowling Green, Ohio with the express purpose of starting the academic study of popular culture. He was fortunate to have the support of both the dean of his college and the University President at the time. At that point, Mr. Browne's career and the popular culture movement took off. He founded the Journal of Popular Culture in 1967 and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 1968. These were the first entities of their kind to focus on the study of everyday culture.
From the beginning, Mr. Browne cast his net widely. A perusal of a recent program from the Popular Culture association annual conference includes such subjects as comic books, fashion studies, Stephen King, mystery and detective fiction, children's literature, westerns, rock music, internet culture, sports culture, vampires, world fairs and expositions, food and popular culture, the Civil War, digital culture, Arthurian legends, travel culture, slapstick comedy, romance fiction, motorcycle culture, medical humanities, popular architecture and design, and hundreds of other subjects covering aspects of everyday life. Quite simply, Mr. Browne viewed popular culture as what most people spend most of their life doing.
He founded the Popular Culture Library at BGSU in 1970. The Library now holds 190,000 books and hundreds of thousands of other materials related to the study of popular culture. The repository is perhaps the leading source for popular culture artifacts in the nation. In 1970 he founded the Popular Culture Association (PCA) to organize and promote the study of popular culture both in the U.S. and internationally. The annual national convention, held since 1971, regularly draws more than 2000 participants. Browne later founded a sister organization to the PCA, the American Culture Association, to focus solely on American popular culture.
His focus on everyday culture earned him many honors and high visibility in the media. He appeared several times on the CBS Evening News, as well as on the Phil Donahue show, BBC N
***********************************************************************************************
Ray B. Browne, who more than four decades ago founded the academic discipline of popular-culture studies, and who in the years that followed presided over the somewhat unlikely, often uneasy and almost always stimulating marriage between the ivory tower and Mickey Mouse, Madonna and Michael Jackson, among many other subjects, died on Oct. 22 at his home in Bowling Green, Ohio. He was 87.
His niece Barbara Moran confirmed the death, saying it was from natural causes.
At his death, Professor Browne was a distinguished university professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University, where he had taught from 1967 to 1992. A folklorist and literary scholar who specialized in Twain and Melville, he founded the university's department of popular culture, the first such academic department in the country, in 1973.
The news media often credited Professor Browne with having coined the term "popular culture," but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression goes back at least to 1854, when it appeared in print in The Defiance Democrat in Ohio. But it is fair, and entirely fitting, to say that Professor Browne popularized the phrase.
For decades a highly visible public intellectual, Professor Browne was quoted often in major newspapers and profiled in People magazine. He wrote nearly a dozen books and edited more than 40 others.
Among the titles he edited are "Lincoln-Lore: Lincoln in the Popular Mind" (1974); "The Defective Detective in the Pulps" (1983; with Gary Hoppenstand); "Forbidden Fruits: Taboos and Tabooism in Culture" (1984); and "The Gothic World of Stephen King" (1987; with Mr. Hoppenstand). All were published by the Popular Press, which Professor Browne founded in 1970 with his wife, Pat Browne. Inaugurated at Bowling Green, the Popular Press is now an imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press.
Popular culture casts a wide net. It takes in dime novels, tabloid newspapers and TV weathermen; the Monkees, the Muppets and "The Love Boat"; T-shirts and G-strings; baseball cards and tarot cards; infomercials, Chatty Cathy dolls and needlepoint pillows; Bob Hope, Tiny Tim, Archie Bunker and Erica Jong; Tupperware, cream pies and Spam (both kinds); hood ornaments, Harlequin romances, "Leave It to Beaver" and a great deal else. For some, this ecumenicalism is part of the field's appeal. For others, it is precisely what makes it seem unfit for scholarly consumption.
Professor Browne was often called upon to defend the honor of his discipline, the object of wide derision when it was begun and the subject of renewed attacks by traditionalists amid the canon wars of the 1980s. (The two-credit course on roller coasters, rides included, that Bowling Green offered in 1978 came in for a particular drubbing by scholars and the media.)
"I've been criticized for three things," Professor Browne told The Chicago Tribune in 1988. "Wasting taxpayer money, embarrassing my colleagues and corrupting youth."
His reply to his critics was simple and eloquent. "Popular culture is the voice of democracy, democracy speaking and acting, the seedbed in which democracy grows," he said in an interview in 2002 with Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900 to Present). "It is the everyday world around us: the mass media, entertainments and diversions. It is our heroes, icons, rituals, everyday actions, psychology and religion ? our total life picture. It is the way of living we inherit, practice and modify as we please, and how we do it. It is the dreams we dream while asleep."
Ray Broadus Browne was born in Millport, Ala., on Jan. 15, 1922. His father was a banker, but the bank closed after the crash of 1929, and the family was soon lining their shoes with cardboard, his niece said. As a teenager, Ray picked cotton for 10 cents a day. In World War II, he served in Europe with an Army artillery unit, but often landed in the stockade because, as he later wrote, "I did not have enough 'Sirs' in my vocabulary."
After receiving a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Alabama in 1943, he earned a master's in English and comparative literature from Columbia in 1947 and a doctorate in English and folklore from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1956. Before joining the Bowling Green faculty, Professor Browne taught at the Universities of Nebraska and Maryland and Purdue University.
In 1967, the year he arrived at Bowling Green, Professor Browne founded both its Center for the Study of Popular Culture and The Journal of Popular Culture, the field's first scholarly journal. He later founded the Popular Culture Association and the American Culture Association (the two now operate jointly) and The Journal of American Culture.
Today, courses on pop-cultural subjects are offered at colleges and universities throughout the United States. The department at Bowling Green, which awards B.A. and M.A. degrees, remains the only one in the country dedicated specifically to the field.
Professor Browne's first wife, Olwyn Orde, died in a car accident in 1964, along with a son, Rowan. He is survived by two other sons from his first marriage, Glenn and Kevin; his second wife, the former Alice Maxine Matthews, known as Pat; a daughter, Alicia Browne, from his marriage to Ms. Matthews; and three grandchildren.
With his wife Pat, Professor Browne started a major archive at Bowling Greene now called the Browne Popular Culture Library. The couple also edited The Guide to United States Popular Culture (Popular Press, 2001), a 1,010-page reference work touching on everything from "The A-Team" to zydeco.
Of the guide's 1,600 entries, one in particular was a favorite of Professor Browne's. It was the page-long article, written by him, on the subject of wallpaper.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 28, 2009, Section A, Page 31 of the New York edition with the headline: Ray Browne, 87, Founder Of Pop-Culture Studies.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
29 Oct 2009, Thu • Page 19
***************************************
Ray was always one to question convention and authority. As a former professor of English and Literature, he broke academic conventions in the 1960's and 1970's to pioneer the study of popular culture, the study of everyday cultural life. In the process, he helped revolutionize the subject matter that scholars in English, American Studies, Sociology, Radio/ Television/Film, and other disciplines view as acceptable and helped drive the academic study of what most people spend most of their free time pursuing.
Born on January 15, 1922 in Millport, Alabama to Garfield and Annie (Trull) Browne.
He married Alice "Pat" (Matthews) on August 25, 1965 and she survives of Bowling Green.
Also surviving are sons, Glenn and Kevin Browne; daughter, Alicia Browne and three grandchildren.
He fought in World War II in an arullery unit in the European Theater, and then studied in England at the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham for a year after the war ended.
From there, he returned to the U.S. and earned a masters degree in Victorian Literature from Columbia University.
He spent two years teaching at the University of Nebraska in the late 1940's before attending the University of California at Los Angeles, earning a Ph.D. in English and Folklore in 1956.
Mr. Browne taught at the University of Maryland from 1956-1960, and at Purdue University from 1960-1967.
A prodigious scholar, he published dozens of articles and numerous books in his early career.
In 1967, Ray moved to Bowling Green State University, in Bowling Green, Ohio with the express purpose of starting the academic study of popular culture. He was fortunate to have the support of both the dean of his college and the University President at the time. At that point, Mr. Browne's career and the popular culture movement took off.
He founded the Journal of Popular Culture in 1967 and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 1968. These were the first entities of their kind to focus on the study of everyday culture.
From the beginning, Mr. Browne cast his net widely. A perusal of a recent program from the Popular Culture association annual conference includes such subjects as comic books, fashion studies, Stephen King, mystery and detective fiction, children's literature, westerns, rock music, internet culture, sports culture, vampires, world fairs and expositions, food and popular culture, the Civil War, digital culture, Arthurian legends, travel culture, slapstick comedy, romance fiction, motorcycle culture, medical humanities, popular architecture and design, and hundreds of other subjects covering aspects of everyday life. Quite simply, Mr. Browne viewed popular culture as what most people spend most of their life doing.
He founded the Popular Culture Library at BGSU in 1970. The Library now holds 190,000 books and hundreds of thousands of other materials related to the study of popular culture. The repository is perhaps the leading source for popular culture artifacts in the nation.
In 1970 he founded the Popular Culture Association (PCA) to organize and promote the study of popular culture both in the U.S. and internationally. The annual national convention, held since 1971, regularly draws more than 2000 participants.
Browne later founded a sister organization to the PCA, the American Culture Association, to focus solely on American popular culture.
His focus on everyday culture earned him many honors and high visibility in the media. He appeared several times on the CBS Evening News, as well as on the Phil Donahue show, BBC News, and other television programs. He was the subject of a USA Today profile (December 22, 1986), and articles about him appeared in People magazine (July 11, 1977), and Rolling Stones (October 1988). He was quoted hundreds of times in newspapers, including The New York times, The Wall street Journals, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Toledo Blade, and many others.
He was named a Distinguished University Professor at BGSU, the university's highest honor for professors, in 1977.
He worked tirelessly writing books and promoting popular culture studies until just two months before his death.
His lasting impact on academia is of major significance. While at BGSU, he wrote, edited, or co-edited more than 50 book, dozens of articles, a compendium Guide to United States Popular Culture, and hundreds of book reviews. Most universities in The U.S. and many abroad, now teach courses in popular culture (under various names) in departments of English, Sociology, and History. American Studies, Anthropology, and others. Making these courses acceptable to university faculty and administrators, to study of culture of everyday life, is his legacy.
One of the most flattering lines about him, which describes his life and his career perfectly, is from colleague R. Serge Denisoff in a book dedicated many years ago; "To Ray B. Browne, a gentle revolutionary in the ivory tower."
Visitation will be held on Tuesday, (October 27, 2009) from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. at the Holman Funeral Home (334-774-5348) Ozark, Alabama. A Graveside Service will be held Wednesday (October 28, 2009) at 11:00 a.m. at the Woodlawn Memory Gardens in Ozark, Alabama.
Local arrangements are being handled by Dunn Funeral Home, 408 W. Wooster St. (located in the Historical District in Bowling Green).
On-line condolences may be sent to the family by visiting www.dunnfuneralhome.com
Published in Toledo Blade on October 24, 2009∼*He is buried in another location see obit below
Obituary of Ray B. Browne
Mr. Ray B Browne, age 87, of Bowling Green, Ohio, passed away Thursday October 22, 2009, in Bowling Green, Ohio.
Funeral services will be graveside at 11:00 A.M. Wednesday, October 28, 2009, in Woodlawn Memory Gardens. Interment will follow with Holman Funeral Home of Ozark directing. The family will receive friends at the funeral home from 6:00 P. M. until 8:00 P. M. Tuesday evening, October 27, 2009.
Ray was always one to question convention and authority. As a former professor of English and Literature, he broke academic conventions in the 1960's and 1970's to pioneer the study of popular culture, the study of everyday cultural life. In the process, he helped revolutionize the subject matter that scholars in English, American Studies, Sociology, Radio/Television/Film, and other disciplines view as acceptable and helped drive the academic study of what most people spend most of their free time pursuing.
Born on January 15, 1922 in Millport, Alabama to Garfield and Annie (Trull) Browne. He married Alice "Pat" (Matthews) on August 25, 1965 and she survives of Bowling Green. Also surviving are sons, Glenn & Kevin Browne, daughter, Alicia Browne and three grandchildren.
He fought in World War II in an artillery unit in the European Theater, and the studied in England at the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham for a year after the war ended. From there, he returned to the U.S. and earned a masters degree in Victorian Literature from Columbia University. He spent two years teaching at the University of Nebraska in the late 1940's before attending the University of California at Los Angeles, earning a Ph.D. in English and Folklore in 1956.
Mr. Browne taught at the University of Maryland from 1956-1960, and at Purdue University from 1960-1967. A prodigious scholar, he published dozens of articles and numerous books in his early career.
In 1967, Ray moved to Bowling Green State University, in Bowling Green, Ohio with the express purpose of starting the academic study of popular culture. He was fortunate to have the support of both the dean of his college and the University President at the time. At that point, Mr. Browne's career and the popular culture movement took off. He founded the Journal of Popular Culture in 1967 and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 1968. These were the first entities of their kind to focus on the study of everyday culture.
From the beginning, Mr. Browne cast his net widely. A perusal of a recent program from the Popular Culture association annual conference includes such subjects as comic books, fashion studies, Stephen King, mystery and detective fiction, children's literature, westerns, rock music, internet culture, sports culture, vampires, world fairs and expositions, food and popular culture, the Civil War, digital culture, Arthurian legends, travel culture, slapstick comedy, romance fiction, motorcycle culture, medical humanities, popular architecture and design, and hundreds of other subjects covering aspects of everyday life. Quite simply, Mr. Browne viewed popular culture as what most people spend most of their life doing.
He founded the Popular Culture Library at BGSU in 1970. The Library now holds 190,000 books and hundreds of thousands of other materials related to the study of popular culture. The repository is perhaps the leading source for popular culture artifacts in the nation. In 1970 he founded the Popular Culture Association (PCA) to organize and promote the study of popular culture both in the U.S. and internationally. The annual national convention, held since 1971, regularly draws more than 2000 participants. Browne later founded a sister organization to the PCA, the American Culture Association, to focus solely on American popular culture.
His focus on everyday culture earned him many honors and high visibility in the media. He appeared several times on the CBS Evening News, as well as on the Phil Donahue show, BBC N
***********************************************************************************************
Ray B. Browne, who more than four decades ago founded the academic discipline of popular-culture studies, and who in the years that followed presided over the somewhat unlikely, often uneasy and almost always stimulating marriage between the ivory tower and Mickey Mouse, Madonna and Michael Jackson, among many other subjects, died on Oct. 22 at his home in Bowling Green, Ohio. He was 87.
His niece Barbara Moran confirmed the death, saying it was from natural causes.
At his death, Professor Browne was a distinguished university professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University, where he had taught from 1967 to 1992. A folklorist and literary scholar who specialized in Twain and Melville, he founded the university's department of popular culture, the first such academic department in the country, in 1973.
The news media often credited Professor Browne with having coined the term "popular culture," but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression goes back at least to 1854, when it appeared in print in The Defiance Democrat in Ohio. But it is fair, and entirely fitting, to say that Professor Browne popularized the phrase.
For decades a highly visible public intellectual, Professor Browne was quoted often in major newspapers and profiled in People magazine. He wrote nearly a dozen books and edited more than 40 others.
Among the titles he edited are "Lincoln-Lore: Lincoln in the Popular Mind" (1974); "The Defective Detective in the Pulps" (1983; with Gary Hoppenstand); "Forbidden Fruits: Taboos and Tabooism in Culture" (1984); and "The Gothic World of Stephen King" (1987; with Mr. Hoppenstand). All were published by the Popular Press, which Professor Browne founded in 1970 with his wife, Pat Browne. Inaugurated at Bowling Green, the Popular Press is now an imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press.
Popular culture casts a wide net. It takes in dime novels, tabloid newspapers and TV weathermen; the Monkees, the Muppets and "The Love Boat"; T-shirts and G-strings; baseball cards and tarot cards; infomercials, Chatty Cathy dolls and needlepoint pillows; Bob Hope, Tiny Tim, Archie Bunker and Erica Jong; Tupperware, cream pies and Spam (both kinds); hood ornaments, Harlequin romances, "Leave It to Beaver" and a great deal else. For some, this ecumenicalism is part of the field's appeal. For others, it is precisely what makes it seem unfit for scholarly consumption.
Professor Browne was often called upon to defend the honor of his discipline, the object of wide derision when it was begun and the subject of renewed attacks by traditionalists amid the canon wars of the 1980s. (The two-credit course on roller coasters, rides included, that Bowling Green offered in 1978 came in for a particular drubbing by scholars and the media.)
"I've been criticized for three things," Professor Browne told The Chicago Tribune in 1988. "Wasting taxpayer money, embarrassing my colleagues and corrupting youth."
His reply to his critics was simple and eloquent. "Popular culture is the voice of democracy, democracy speaking and acting, the seedbed in which democracy grows," he said in an interview in 2002 with Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900 to Present). "It is the everyday world around us: the mass media, entertainments and diversions. It is our heroes, icons, rituals, everyday actions, psychology and religion ? our total life picture. It is the way of living we inherit, practice and modify as we please, and how we do it. It is the dreams we dream while asleep."
Ray Broadus Browne was born in Millport, Ala., on Jan. 15, 1922. His father was a banker, but the bank closed after the crash of 1929, and the family was soon lining their shoes with cardboard, his niece said. As a teenager, Ray picked cotton for 10 cents a day. In World War II, he served in Europe with an Army artillery unit, but often landed in the stockade because, as he later wrote, "I did not have enough 'Sirs' in my vocabulary."
After receiving a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Alabama in 1943, he earned a master's in English and comparative literature from Columbia in 1947 and a doctorate in English and folklore from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1956. Before joining the Bowling Green faculty, Professor Browne taught at the Universities of Nebraska and Maryland and Purdue University.
In 1967, the year he arrived at Bowling Green, Professor Browne founded both its Center for the Study of Popular Culture and The Journal of Popular Culture, the field's first scholarly journal. He later founded the Popular Culture Association and the American Culture Association (the two now operate jointly) and The Journal of American Culture.
Today, courses on pop-cultural subjects are offered at colleges and universities throughout the United States. The department at Bowling Green, which awards B.A. and M.A. degrees, remains the only one in the country dedicated specifically to the field.
Professor Browne's first wife, Olwyn Orde, died in a car accident in 1964, along with a son, Rowan. He is survived by two other sons from his first marriage, Glenn and Kevin; his second wife, the former Alice Maxine Matthews, known as Pat; a daughter, Alicia Browne, from his marriage to Ms. Matthews; and three grandchildren.
With his wife Pat, Professor Browne started a major archive at Bowling Greene now called the Browne Popular Culture Library. The couple also edited The Guide to United States Popular Culture (Popular Press, 2001), a 1,010-page reference work touching on everything from "The A-Team" to zydeco.
Of the guide's 1,600 entries, one in particular was a favorite of Professor Browne's. It was the page-long article, written by him, on the subject of wallpaper.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 28, 2009, Section A, Page 31 of the New York edition with the headline: Ray Browne, 87, Founder Of Pop-Culture Studies.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
29 Oct 2009, Thu • Page 19
***************************************
Ray B. Browne, 87, of Bowling Green, Ohio, passed away Thursday, October 22, 2009, in Bowling Green, Ohio.
Ray was always one to question convention and authority. As a former professor of English and Literature, he broke academic conventions in the 1960's and 1970's to pioneer the study of popular culture, the study of everyday cultural life. In the process, he helped revolutionize the subject matter that scholars in English, American Studies, Sociology, Radio/ Television/Film, and other disciplines view as acceptable and helped drive the academic study of what most people spend most of their free time pursuing.
Born on January 15, 1922 in Millport, Alabama to Garfield and Annie (Trull) Browne.
He married Alice "Pat" (Matthews) on August 25, 1965 and she survives of Bowling Green.
Also surviving are sons, Glenn and Kevin Browne; daughter, Alicia Browne and three grandchildren.
He fought in World War II in an arullery unit in the European Theater, and then studied in England at the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham for a year after the war ended.
From there, he returned to the U.S. and earned a masters degree in Victorian Literature from Columbia University.
He spent two years teaching at the University of Nebraska in the late 1940's before attending the University of California at Los Angeles, earning a Ph.D. in English and Folklore in 1956.
Mr. Browne taught at the University of Maryland from 1956-1960, and at Purdue University from 1960-1967.
A prodigious scholar, he published dozens of articles and numerous books in his early career.
In 1967, Ray moved to Bowling Green State University, in Bowling Green, Ohio with the express purpose of starting the academic study of popular culture. He was fortunate to have the support of both the dean of his college and the University President at the time. At that point, Mr. Browne's career and the popular culture movement took off.
He founded the Journal of Popular Culture in 1967 and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 1968. These were the first entities of their kind to focus on the study of everyday culture.
From the beginning, Mr. Browne cast his net widely. A perusal of a recent program from the Popular Culture association annual conference includes such subjects as comic books, fashion studies, Stephen King, mystery and detective fiction, children's literature, westerns, rock music, internet culture, sports culture, vampires, world fairs and expositions, food and popular culture, the Civil War, digital culture, Arthurian legends, travel culture, slapstick comedy, romance fiction, motorcycle culture, medical humanities, popular architecture and design, and hundreds of other subjects covering aspects of everyday life. Quite simply, Mr. Browne viewed popular culture as what most people spend most of their life doing.
He founded the Popular Culture Library at BGSU in 1970. The Library now holds 190,000 books and hundreds of thousands of other materials related to the study of popular culture. The repository is perhaps the leading source for popular culture artifacts in the nation.
In 1970 he founded the Popular Culture Association (PCA) to organize and promote the study of popular culture both in the U.S. and internationally. The annual national convention, held since 1971, regularly draws more than 2000 participants.
Browne later founded a sister organization to the PCA, the American Culture Association, to focus solely on American popular culture.
His focus on everyday culture earned him many honors and high visibility in the media. He appeared several times on the CBS Evening News, as well as on the Phil Donahue show, BBC News, and other television programs. He was the subject of a USA Today profile (December 22, 1986), and articles about him appeared in People magazine (July 11, 1977), and Rolling Stones (October 1988). He was quoted hundreds of times in newspapers, including The New York times, The Wall street Journals, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Toledo Blade, and many others.
He was named a Distinguished University Professor at BGSU, the university's highest honor for professors, in 1977.
He worked tirelessly writing books and promoting popular culture studies until just two months before his death.
His lasting impact on academia is of major significance. While at BGSU, he wrote, edited, or co-edited more than 50 book, dozens of articles, a compendium Guide to United States Popular Culture, and hundreds of book reviews. Most universities in The U.S. and many abroad, now teach courses in popular culture (under various names) in departments of English, Sociology, and History. American Studies, Anthropology, and others. Making these courses acceptable to university faculty and administrators, to study of culture of everyday life, is his legacy.
One of the most flattering lines about him, which describes his life and his career perfectly, is from colleague R. Serge Denisoff in a book dedicated many years ago; "To Ray B. Browne, a gentle revolutionary in the ivory tower."
Visitation will be held on Tuesday, (October 27, 2009) from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. at the Holman Funeral Home (334-774-5348) Ozark, Alabama. A Graveside Service will be held Wednesday (October 28, 2009) at 11:00 a.m. at the Woodlawn Memory Gardens in Ozark, Alabama.
Local arrangements are being handled by Dunn Funeral Home, 408 W. Wooster St. (located in the Historical District in Bowling Green).
On-line condolences may be sent to the family by visiting www.dunnfuneralhome.com
Published in Toledo Blade on October 24, 2009∼*He is buried in another location see obit below
Obituary of Ray B. Browne
Mr. Ray B Browne, age 87, of Bowling Green, Ohio, passed away Thursday October 22, 2009, in Bowling Green, Ohio.
Funeral services will be graveside at 11:00 A.M. Wednesday, October 28, 2009, in Woodlawn Memory Gardens. Interment will follow with Holman Funeral Home of Ozark directing. The family will receive friends at the funeral home from 6:00 P. M. until 8:00 P. M. Tuesday evening, October 27, 2009.
Ray was always one to question convention and authority. As a former professor of English and Literature, he broke academic conventions in the 1960's and 1970's to pioneer the study of popular culture, the study of everyday cultural life. In the process, he helped revolutionize the subject matter that scholars in English, American Studies, Sociology, Radio/Television/Film, and other disciplines view as acceptable and helped drive the academic study of what most people spend most of their free time pursuing.
Born on January 15, 1922 in Millport, Alabama to Garfield and Annie (Trull) Browne. He married Alice "Pat" (Matthews) on August 25, 1965 and she survives of Bowling Green. Also surviving are sons, Glenn & Kevin Browne, daughter, Alicia Browne and three grandchildren.
He fought in World War II in an artillery unit in the European Theater, and the studied in England at the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham for a year after the war ended. From there, he returned to the U.S. and earned a masters degree in Victorian Literature from Columbia University. He spent two years teaching at the University of Nebraska in the late 1940's before attending the University of California at Los Angeles, earning a Ph.D. in English and Folklore in 1956.
Mr. Browne taught at the University of Maryland from 1956-1960, and at Purdue University from 1960-1967. A prodigious scholar, he published dozens of articles and numerous books in his early career.
In 1967, Ray moved to Bowling Green State University, in Bowling Green, Ohio with the express purpose of starting the academic study of popular culture. He was fortunate to have the support of both the dean of his college and the University President at the time. At that point, Mr. Browne's career and the popular culture movement took off. He founded the Journal of Popular Culture in 1967 and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 1968. These were the first entities of their kind to focus on the study of everyday culture.
From the beginning, Mr. Browne cast his net widely. A perusal of a recent program from the Popular Culture association annual conference includes such subjects as comic books, fashion studies, Stephen King, mystery and detective fiction, children's literature, westerns, rock music, internet culture, sports culture, vampires, world fairs and expositions, food and popular culture, the Civil War, digital culture, Arthurian legends, travel culture, slapstick comedy, romance fiction, motorcycle culture, medical humanities, popular architecture and design, and hundreds of other subjects covering aspects of everyday life. Quite simply, Mr. Browne viewed popular culture as what most people spend most of their life doing.
He founded the Popular Culture Library at BGSU in 1970. The Library now holds 190,000 books and hundreds of thousands of other materials related to the study of popular culture. The repository is perhaps the leading source for popular culture artifacts in the nation. In 1970 he founded the Popular Culture Association (PCA) to organize and promote the study of popular culture both in the U.S. and internationally. The annual national convention, held since 1971, regularly draws more than 2000 participants. Browne later founded a sister organization to the PCA, the American Culture Association, to focus solely on American popular culture.
His focus on everyday culture earned him many honors and high visibility in the media. He appeared several times on the CBS Evening News, as well as on the Phil Donahue show, BBC N
***********************************************************************************************
Ray B. Browne, who more than four decades ago founded the academic discipline of popular-culture studies, and who in the years that followed presided over the somewhat unlikely, often uneasy and almost always stimulating marriage between the ivory tower and Mickey Mouse, Madonna and Michael Jackson, among many other subjects, died on Oct. 22 at his home in Bowling Green, Ohio. He was 87.
His niece Barbara Moran confirmed the death, saying it was from natural causes.
At his death, Professor Browne was a distinguished university professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University, where he had taught from 1967 to 1992. A folklorist and literary scholar who specialized in Twain and Melville, he founded the university's department of popular culture, the first such academic department in the country, in 1973.
The news media often credited Professor Browne with having coined the term "popular culture," but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression goes back at least to 1854, when it appeared in print in The Defiance Democrat in Ohio. But it is fair, and entirely fitting, to say that Professor Browne popularized the phrase.
For decades a highly visible public intellectual, Professor Browne was quoted often in major newspapers and profiled in People magazine. He wrote nearly a dozen books and edited more than 40 others.
Among the titles he edited are "Lincoln-Lore: Lincoln in the Popular Mind" (1974); "The Defective Detective in the Pulps" (1983; with Gary Hoppenstand); "Forbidden Fruits: Taboos and Tabooism in Culture" (1984); and "The Gothic World of Stephen King" (1987; with Mr. Hoppenstand). All were published by the Popular Press, which Professor Browne founded in 1970 with his wife, Pat Browne. Inaugurated at Bowling Green, the Popular Press is now an imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press.
Popular culture casts a wide net. It takes in dime novels, tabloid newspapers and TV weathermen; the Monkees, the Muppets and "The Love Boat"; T-shirts and G-strings; baseball cards and tarot cards; infomercials, Chatty Cathy dolls and needlepoint pillows; Bob Hope, Tiny Tim, Archie Bunker and Erica Jong; Tupperware, cream pies and Spam (both kinds); hood ornaments, Harlequin romances, "Leave It to Beaver" and a great deal else. For some, this ecumenicalism is part of the field's appeal. For others, it is precisely what makes it seem unfit for scholarly consumption.
Professor Browne was often called upon to defend the honor of his discipline, the object of wide derision when it was begun and the subject of renewed attacks by traditionalists amid the canon wars of the 1980s. (The two-credit course on roller coasters, rides included, that Bowling Green offered in 1978 came in for a particular drubbing by scholars and the media.)
"I've been criticized for three things," Professor Browne told The Chicago Tribune in 1988. "Wasting taxpayer money, embarrassing my colleagues and corrupting youth."
His reply to his critics was simple and eloquent. "Popular culture is the voice of democracy, democracy speaking and acting, the seedbed in which democracy grows," he said in an interview in 2002 with Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900 to Present). "It is the everyday world around us: the mass media, entertainments and diversions. It is our heroes, icons, rituals, everyday actions, psychology and religion ? our total life picture. It is the way of living we inherit, practice and modify as we please, and how we do it. It is the dreams we dream while asleep."
Ray Broadus Browne was born in Millport, Ala., on Jan. 15, 1922. His father was a banker, but the bank closed after the crash of 1929, and the family was soon lining their shoes with cardboard, his niece said. As a teenager, Ray picked cotton for 10 cents a day. In World War II, he served in Europe with an Army artillery unit, but often landed in the stockade because, as he later wrote, "I did not have enough 'Sirs' in my vocabulary."
After receiving a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Alabama in 1943, he earned a master's in English and comparative literature from Columbia in 1947 and a doctorate in English and folklore from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1956. Before joining the Bowling Green faculty, Professor Browne taught at the Universities of Nebraska and Maryland and Purdue University.
In 1967, the year he arrived at Bowling Green, Professor Browne founded both its Center for the Study of Popular Culture and The Journal of Popular Culture, the field's first scholarly journal. He later founded the Popular Culture Association and the American Culture Association (the two now operate jointly) and The Journal of American Culture.
Today, courses on pop-cultural subjects are offered at colleges and universities throughout the United States. The department at Bowling Green, which awards B.A. and M.A. degrees, remains the only one in the country dedicated specifically to the field.
Professor Browne's first wife, Olwyn Orde, died in a car accident in 1964, along with a son, Rowan. He is survived by two other sons from his first marriage, Glenn and Kevin; his second wife, the former Alice Maxine Matthews, known as Pat; a daughter, Alicia Browne, from his marriage to Ms. Matthews; and three grandchildren.
With his wife Pat, Professor Browne started a major archive at Bowling Greene now called the Browne Popular Culture Library. The couple also edited The Guide to United States Popular Culture (Popular Press, 2001), a 1,010-page reference work touching on everything from "The A-Team" to zydeco.
Of the guide's 1,600 entries, one in particular was a favorite of Professor Browne's. It was the page-long article, written by him, on the subject of wallpaper.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 28, 2009, Section A, Page 31 of the New York edition with the headline: Ray Browne, 87, Founder Of Pop-Culture Studies.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
29 Oct 2009, Thu • Page 19
***************************************
Ray was always one to question convention and authority. As a former professor of English and Literature, he broke academic conventions in the 1960's and 1970's to pioneer the study of popular culture, the study of everyday cultural life. In the process, he helped revolutionize the subject matter that scholars in English, American Studies, Sociology, Radio/ Television/Film, and other disciplines view as acceptable and helped drive the academic study of what most people spend most of their free time pursuing.
Born on January 15, 1922 in Millport, Alabama to Garfield and Annie (Trull) Browne.
He married Alice "Pat" (Matthews) on August 25, 1965 and she survives of Bowling Green.
Also surviving are sons, Glenn and Kevin Browne; daughter, Alicia Browne and three grandchildren.
He fought in World War II in an arullery unit in the European Theater, and then studied in England at the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham for a year after the war ended.
From there, he returned to the U.S. and earned a masters degree in Victorian Literature from Columbia University.
He spent two years teaching at the University of Nebraska in the late 1940's before attending the University of California at Los Angeles, earning a Ph.D. in English and Folklore in 1956.
Mr. Browne taught at the University of Maryland from 1956-1960, and at Purdue University from 1960-1967.
A prodigious scholar, he published dozens of articles and numerous books in his early career.
In 1967, Ray moved to Bowling Green State University, in Bowling Green, Ohio with the express purpose of starting the academic study of popular culture. He was fortunate to have the support of both the dean of his college and the University President at the time. At that point, Mr. Browne's career and the popular culture movement took off.
He founded the Journal of Popular Culture in 1967 and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 1968. These were the first entities of their kind to focus on the study of everyday culture.
From the beginning, Mr. Browne cast his net widely. A perusal of a recent program from the Popular Culture association annual conference includes such subjects as comic books, fashion studies, Stephen King, mystery and detective fiction, children's literature, westerns, rock music, internet culture, sports culture, vampires, world fairs and expositions, food and popular culture, the Civil War, digital culture, Arthurian legends, travel culture, slapstick comedy, romance fiction, motorcycle culture, medical humanities, popular architecture and design, and hundreds of other subjects covering aspects of everyday life. Quite simply, Mr. Browne viewed popular culture as what most people spend most of their life doing.
He founded the Popular Culture Library at BGSU in 1970. The Library now holds 190,000 books and hundreds of thousands of other materials related to the study of popular culture. The repository is perhaps the leading source for popular culture artifacts in the nation.
In 1970 he founded the Popular Culture Association (PCA) to organize and promote the study of popular culture both in the U.S. and internationally. The annual national convention, held since 1971, regularly draws more than 2000 participants.
Browne later founded a sister organization to the PCA, the American Culture Association, to focus solely on American popular culture.
His focus on everyday culture earned him many honors and high visibility in the media. He appeared several times on the CBS Evening News, as well as on the Phil Donahue show, BBC News, and other television programs. He was the subject of a USA Today profile (December 22, 1986), and articles about him appeared in People magazine (July 11, 1977), and Rolling Stones (October 1988). He was quoted hundreds of times in newspapers, including The New York times, The Wall street Journals, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Toledo Blade, and many others.
He was named a Distinguished University Professor at BGSU, the university's highest honor for professors, in 1977.
He worked tirelessly writing books and promoting popular culture studies until just two months before his death.
His lasting impact on academia is of major significance. While at BGSU, he wrote, edited, or co-edited more than 50 book, dozens of articles, a compendium Guide to United States Popular Culture, and hundreds of book reviews. Most universities in The U.S. and many abroad, now teach courses in popular culture (under various names) in departments of English, Sociology, and History. American Studies, Anthropology, and others. Making these courses acceptable to university faculty and administrators, to study of culture of everyday life, is his legacy.
One of the most flattering lines about him, which describes his life and his career perfectly, is from colleague R. Serge Denisoff in a book dedicated many years ago; "To Ray B. Browne, a gentle revolutionary in the ivory tower."
Visitation will be held on Tuesday, (October 27, 2009) from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. at the Holman Funeral Home (334-774-5348) Ozark, Alabama. A Graveside Service will be held Wednesday (October 28, 2009) at 11:00 a.m. at the Woodlawn Memory Gardens in Ozark, Alabama.
Local arrangements are being handled by Dunn Funeral Home, 408 W. Wooster St. (located in the Historical District in Bowling Green).
On-line condolences may be sent to the family by visiting www.dunnfuneralhome.com
Published in Toledo Blade on October 24, 2009∼*He is buried in another location see obit below
Obituary of Ray B. Browne
Mr. Ray B Browne, age 87, of Bowling Green, Ohio, passed away Thursday October 22, 2009, in Bowling Green, Ohio.
Funeral services will be graveside at 11:00 A.M. Wednesday, October 28, 2009, in Woodlawn Memory Gardens. Interment will follow with Holman Funeral Home of Ozark directing. The family will receive friends at the funeral home from 6:00 P. M. until 8:00 P. M. Tuesday evening, October 27, 2009.
Ray was always one to question convention and authority. As a former professor of English and Literature, he broke academic conventions in the 1960's and 1970's to pioneer the study of popular culture, the study of everyday cultural life. In the process, he helped revolutionize the subject matter that scholars in English, American Studies, Sociology, Radio/Television/Film, and other disciplines view as acceptable and helped drive the academic study of what most people spend most of their free time pursuing.
Born on January 15, 1922 in Millport, Alabama to Garfield and Annie (Trull) Browne. He married Alice "Pat" (Matthews) on August 25, 1965 and she survives of Bowling Green. Also surviving are sons, Glenn & Kevin Browne, daughter, Alicia Browne and three grandchildren.
He fought in World War II in an artillery unit in the European Theater, and the studied in England at the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham for a year after the war ended. From there, he returned to the U.S. and earned a masters degree in Victorian Literature from Columbia University. He spent two years teaching at the University of Nebraska in the late 1940's before attending the University of California at Los Angeles, earning a Ph.D. in English and Folklore in 1956.
Mr. Browne taught at the University of Maryland from 1956-1960, and at Purdue University from 1960-1967. A prodigious scholar, he published dozens of articles and numerous books in his early career.
In 1967, Ray moved to Bowling Green State University, in Bowling Green, Ohio with the express purpose of starting the academic study of popular culture. He was fortunate to have the support of both the dean of his college and the University President at the time. At that point, Mr. Browne's career and the popular culture movement took off. He founded the Journal of Popular Culture in 1967 and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 1968. These were the first entities of their kind to focus on the study of everyday culture.
From the beginning, Mr. Browne cast his net widely. A perusal of a recent program from the Popular Culture association annual conference includes such subjects as comic books, fashion studies, Stephen King, mystery and detective fiction, children's literature, westerns, rock music, internet culture, sports culture, vampires, world fairs and expositions, food and popular culture, the Civil War, digital culture, Arthurian legends, travel culture, slapstick comedy, romance fiction, motorcycle culture, medical humanities, popular architecture and design, and hundreds of other subjects covering aspects of everyday life. Quite simply, Mr. Browne viewed popular culture as what most people spend most of their life doing.
He founded the Popular Culture Library at BGSU in 1970. The Library now holds 190,000 books and hundreds of thousands of other materials related to the study of popular culture. The repository is perhaps the leading source for popular culture artifacts in the nation. In 1970 he founded the Popular Culture Association (PCA) to organize and promote the study of popular culture both in the U.S. and internationally. The annual national convention, held since 1971, regularly draws more than 2000 participants. Browne later founded a sister organization to the PCA, the American Culture Association, to focus solely on American popular culture.
His focus on everyday culture earned him many honors and high visibility in the media. He appeared several times on the CBS Evening News, as well as on the Phil Donahue show, BBC N
***********************************************************************************************
Ray B. Browne, who more than four decades ago founded the academic discipline of popular-culture studies, and who in the years that followed presided over the somewhat unlikely, often uneasy and almost always stimulating marriage between the ivory tower and Mickey Mouse, Madonna and Michael Jackson, among many other subjects, died on Oct. 22 at his home in Bowling Green, Ohio. He was 87.
His niece Barbara Moran confirmed the death, saying it was from natural causes.
At his death, Professor Browne was a distinguished university professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University, where he had taught from 1967 to 1992. A folklorist and literary scholar who specialized in Twain and Melville, he founded the university's department of popular culture, the first such academic department in the country, in 1973.
The news media often credited Professor Browne with having coined the term "popular culture," but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression goes back at least to 1854, when it appeared in print in The Defiance Democrat in Ohio. But it is fair, and entirely fitting, to say that Professor Browne popularized the phrase.
For decades a highly visible public intellectual, Professor Browne was quoted often in major newspapers and profiled in People magazine. He wrote nearly a dozen books and edited more than 40 others.
Among the titles he edited are "Lincoln-Lore: Lincoln in the Popular Mind" (1974); "The Defective Detective in the Pulps" (1983; with Gary Hoppenstand); "Forbidden Fruits: Taboos and Tabooism in Culture" (1984); and "The Gothic World of Stephen King" (1987; with Mr. Hoppenstand). All were published by the Popular Press, which Professor Browne founded in 1970 with his wife, Pat Browne. Inaugurated at Bowling Green, the Popular Press is now an imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press.
Popular culture casts a wide net. It takes in dime novels, tabloid newspapers and TV weathermen; the Monkees, the Muppets and "The Love Boat"; T-shirts and G-strings; baseball cards and tarot cards; infomercials, Chatty Cathy dolls and needlepoint pillows; Bob Hope, Tiny Tim, Archie Bunker and Erica Jong; Tupperware, cream pies and Spam (both kinds); hood ornaments, Harlequin romances, "Leave It to Beaver" and a great deal else. For some, this ecumenicalism is part of the field's appeal. For others, it is precisely what makes it seem unfit for scholarly consumption.
Professor Browne was often called upon to defend the honor of his discipline, the object of wide derision when it was begun and the subject of renewed attacks by traditionalists amid the canon wars of the 1980s. (The two-credit course on roller coasters, rides included, that Bowling Green offered in 1978 came in for a particular drubbing by scholars and the media.)
"I've been criticized for three things," Professor Browne told The Chicago Tribune in 1988. "Wasting taxpayer money, embarrassing my colleagues and corrupting youth."
His reply to his critics was simple and eloquent. "Popular culture is the voice of democracy, democracy speaking and acting, the seedbed in which democracy grows," he said in an interview in 2002 with Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900 to Present). "It is the everyday world around us: the mass media, entertainments and diversions. It is our heroes, icons, rituals, everyday actions, psychology and religion ? our total life picture. It is the way of living we inherit, practice and modify as we please, and how we do it. It is the dreams we dream while asleep."
Ray Broadus Browne was born in Millport, Ala., on Jan. 15, 1922. His father was a banker, but the bank closed after the crash of 1929, and the family was soon lining their shoes with cardboard, his niece said. As a teenager, Ray picked cotton for 10 cents a day. In World War II, he served in Europe with an Army artillery unit, but often landed in the stockade because, as he later wrote, "I did not have enough 'Sirs' in my vocabulary."
After receiving a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Alabama in 1943, he earned a master's in English and comparative literature from Columbia in 1947 and a doctorate in English and folklore from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1956. Before joining the Bowling Green faculty, Professor Browne taught at the Universities of Nebraska and Maryland and Purdue University.
In 1967, the year he arrived at Bowling Green, Professor Browne founded both its Center for the Study of Popular Culture and The Journal of Popular Culture, the field's first scholarly journal. He later founded the Popular Culture Association and the American Culture Association (the two now operate jointly) and The Journal of American Culture.
Today, courses on pop-cultural subjects are offered at colleges and universities throughout the United States. The department at Bowling Green, which awards B.A. and M.A. degrees, remains the only one in the country dedicated specifically to the field.
Professor Browne's first wife, Olwyn Orde, died in a car accident in 1964, along with a son, Rowan. He is survived by two other sons from his first marriage, Glenn and Kevin; his second wife, the former Alice Maxine Matthews, known as Pat; a daughter, Alicia Browne, from his marriage to Ms. Matthews; and three grandchildren.
With his wife Pat, Professor Browne started a major archive at Bowling Greene now called the Browne Popular Culture Library. The couple also edited The Guide to United States Popular Culture (Popular Press, 2001), a 1,010-page reference work touching on everything from "The A-Team" to zydeco.
Of the guide's 1,600 entries, one in particular was a favorite of Professor Browne's. It was the page-long article, written by him, on the subject of wallpaper.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 28, 2009, Section A, Page 31 of the New York edition with the headline: Ray Browne, 87, Founder Of Pop-Culture Studies.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
29 Oct 2009, Thu • Page 19
***************************************
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