Christiaan De Beukelaer

Christiaan De Beukelaer took up sailing to get away from his desk on weekends, which worked out well until he developed an interest in how to decarbonise the shipping industry. He grew up in Ghent, where he spent much of his teens living on a barge on the river Scheldt.

Trained as a Musicologist at the University of Amsterdam, Christiaan further studied both Cultural Studies and Development Studies at the University of Leuven. He subsequently lived in Burkina Faso and Ghana to study how governments and international organisations mobilised music industries as a driver of “development,” as part of his doctoral studies at the University of Leeds. This award-winning research took him to some of the best (and some of the worst) gigs he’s ever been to.

Christiaan works at the University of Melbourne and has held visiting positions at the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham and at the universities of Copenhagen, Jyväskylä, Cape Town, Hildesheim, and Coimbra. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. In 2012, he won the Cultural Policy Research Award.