Pop Goes the Academy

"A folklorist and literary scholar who specialized in Twain and Melville, he founded the university's department of popular culture, the first such academic department in the country, in 1973.
"The news media often credited Professor Browne with having coined the term 'popular culture,' but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression goes back at least to 1854, when it appeared in print in The Defiance Democrat, in Ohio. But it is fair, and entirely fitting, to say that Professor Browne popularized the phrase."

Margalit Fox in The New York Times writes an obit for Ray Browne.