Giselinde Kuipers is Research Professor at the Center for Sociological Research at KU Leuven University. As a cultural and comparative sociologist, she studies frivolous things and their serious consequences. She is the author of Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke (2006/2015) as well as numerous articles in English, Dutch, French and Italian. In her work, she analyzes how cultural standards are shaped, for instance in humor, humor, beauty, fashion, media, cycling and translation; and how such standards impact social inequalities, identities and interactions. Giselinde curates the Culture and Inequality Podcast, and directs various research projects, including a comparative study of humor scandals in seven European countries. In 2022, she received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council to study beauty and inequality in five global cities. In the fall of 2023, she hopes to finish a book tentatively called Beauty as Taste and Duty: Value and Privilege in the European Beauty Regime.