Professor Nicky Marsh
Humanities Faculty Champion
Professor Nicky Marsh is Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities
My research is on late 20th and 21st century British and American literatures, theories of gender, postmodernism, poetics and economics.
Research interests
The majority of my research is on the intersections between finance and culture, I examine the ways in which economic ideas - money, risk, credit and debt - have been given an imaginary form. Within this I have focused on three broad areas.
Firstly, I work collaboratively on thinking about finance's representations within the public sphere. I co-curated the national touring exhibition, Show me the Money: The Image of Finance. This exhibition was funded by the AHRC and Arts Council, amongst others, and was shown in five locations across the UK in two years. This collaborative team is now working on a second large AHRC project on the History of Financial Advice. This project examines the emergence of a distinctive genre of personal financial advice, tracing it from the personal correspondence of banking families in the Eighteenth century to popular culture in the Twentieth.
Secondly, I have just completed a monograph on finance and American fiction. This book, which examines writers such as Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Jane Rule, examines how novelists responded to the ending of the Gold Standard in the early 1970s, the moment when money stopped having a value outside of itself. It argues that these novelists offered a deeply historicised understanding of what this shift meant to American culture and to a new moment of American imperialism, one the troubles received notions of it as the origin of a 'free floating' money for the postmodern era.
Finally, I also work on the ways in which economic ideas are inflected by questions of gender. This is the central concern of my new work which examines how modernists - such as Mina Loy, Zora Neale Hurston, Ezra Pound and F Scott Fitzgerald - treated money. This project is particularly interested in the ways in which modernists worked critically with the vocabulary for money that was coming from thinkers such as Georg Simmel, Marcel Mauss, Sigmund Freud, John Maynard Keynes in the opening decades of the century.
I welcome applications for postgraduate study of contemporary British or American fiction and poetry. I have particular interests in experimental or late modernist writing, gender and feminism, democracy and the public, and literary economics.