**Koen van Eijck** is professor of Cultural Lifestyles at Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication. He also serves as a Board Member of the Erasmus Research Centre for Media, Communication and Culture (ERMeCC) and is a member of editorial Boards of the journals Poetics, Humanities and Education and *Cultuur + Educatie*. He teaches courses on the philosophy of science, cultural consumption, research methodology and sociology in the Bachelor's and (Research) Master’s programmes of the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication. His research and publications focus on social inequality in cultural participation, taste patterns and trends in leisure behavior and media use in general, talent development and art perception and appreciaton, with a focus on both music and visual art. Koen van Eijck studied developmental psychology at Nijmegen University. In 1996, he received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Tilburg. His thesis examined the impact of family background on education, occupation, and consumption. Van Eijck was a post-doctoral fellow at the Faculty of Arts of Tilburg University, held a similar position at the Department of Sociology of the Radboud University in Nijmegen, was assistant professor at the Department of Leisure Studies in Tilburg, and became associate professor at the Department of Sociology at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium). In 2007, he joined the Department of Arts and Culture Studies at Erasmus University.