Prof Peter Knight

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
• 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)