Prof Peter Knight
Professor of American Studies
Links:
PhD Supervision areas:
I would be interested in supervising projects in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture. Some examples of potential research topics:
- fictions of finance in 19thC and/or 20thC America
- history of financial advice
- history of popular and literary representations of American corporations, and corporate self-representations in PR
- comparative study of how Americans and Europeans came to mis/understand political economy (in business schools curricula, popular self-education manuals, etc.)
- comparative analysis of popular guides to the stock market in 19thC Britain and the US (and/or contemporary China and Eastern Europe)
- literature, film and popular culture in the wake the demise of the international gold standard in 1973, and the crash of 2008
- Americanization and anti-Americanism: transnational approaches to the role of demonology in American politics and culture (especially post-9/11)
- reassessment of particular episodes of American countersubversive fears, such as the Illuminati scares of the 1790s
- investigation of mega-conspiracy theories in contemporary literature and popular culture
- conspiracy theories in the digital age, especially mixed methods (digital methods, ethnography, critical discourse analysis)
I have supervised or co-supervised PhD students on topics including :
- Don DeLillo (Robert McMinn)
- work and happiness in postmodern times (Angela Lait)
- popular evangelical prophecy writings (Jennie Chapman)
- Chester Himes (Will Turner)
- postmodern American encyclopedic fiction (Matthew Tresco)
- discourse of money in American naturalism and modernism (Laura Bekeris Key)
- interactivity in experimental fiction and online gaming environments (Elizabeth Burgess)
- Cormac McCarthy (Tony Harrison)
- the black hair industry in the US since 1975 (Carina Spaulding)
- conspiracy theories in post-Soviet Russia (Ilya Yablokov)
- finance and American Gothic writing (Amy Bride)