Dr. Lucie Chateau is a media scholar and digital culture researcher interested in meme aesthetics. She is interested in the evolution of aesthetics in digital culture, with a focus on the circulation of images in meme culture and the subversive potential of memes as aesthetic forms that negotiate new forms of representation under digital capitalism. Therefore, her work has examined a variety of meme genres, such as depression, anti-capitalist, and climate change memes, through the lens of critical theory and contemporary work on digital capitalism. She is currently working on her monograph entitled Anxious Aesthetics: Memes, Alienation and Digital Capitalism, which specifically looks at the meme economy as a phenomenon within digital capitalism that can mobilise and instigate critique through aesthetics, and has written about the place of alienation as a mediator in this process. 

Dr. Chateau's work incorporates interdisciplinary approaches from a wide range of fields, weaving together philosophical traditions, cultural studies heritage, media studies and contemporary theories on digital capitalism and the digital economy. She is interested in how affect theory and aesthetics can frame current and future digital culture, as well as emerging key topics of media and culture studies such as sustainability, inclusivity and the impact of AI.

Dr Chateau is the lead of the Diversifying Creative AI cluster at Utrecht University’s Inclusive AI Lab, where she conducts research on redefining the value of creative work in a cross-cultural context. She is interested in how collaborative co-creation can question the idea of creativity and authenticity in the Age of AI, with a focus on the circulation of images in meme culture. She is currently working on AI-generated memes and the wider impact of AI aesthetics on popular culture. Her work has been covered by The Guardian, Het Parool, Süddeutsche Zeitung and El Pais, and her book Digital Humanities and the Hermeneutic Tradition, co-authored with Dr. Inge van de Ven, was published by Routledge in 2024. She has given talks for associations such as Internet Archive, Public Spaces and Betweter Festival and delivered the keynotes for the Dutch Association of Aesthetics and the Northern Star Symposium.