The Daily Swarm

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.

“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.”

The couple also edited The Guide to United States Popular Culture (Popular Press, 2001)...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.