We are delighted to announce that Dr Paul Crosthwaite (University of Edinburgh) will be giving the keynote address at Money Talks: Inequality and North American Identity. Dr Crosthwaite completed his PhD at Newcastle University, before spending four years as a Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University, and joining Edinburgh in 2011. He has published books on postmodernist Anglo-American literature, edited collections on the representation of finance, and written articles on these and related topics for journals such as Journal of Cultural Economy, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Cultural Critique.
Dr Crosthwaite’s first monograph, Trauma, Postmodernism and the Aftermath of World War II (2009), challenges theories of postmodern depthlessness and dehistoricization to suggest that writers like Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, and Richard Powers reformulate history as trauma – particularly as related to the cataclysms of the Second World War. His has since furthered his research into the interaction between historical change and cultural production in reference to financial markets and theories of risk. For instance, in 2010 he published ‘Anticipations of the Accident: Modernist Fiction and Systemic Risk’ in Textual Practice. Dr Crosthwaite’s upcoming monograph, Speculative Investments: Finance, Feeling, and Representation in Contemporary Literature and Culture, examines the intersections between literature and financial markets, and focuses especially on afterlives of the modernist tradition at a time when the logic of high finance increasingly pervades contemporary culture. In 2012 he won the Arthur Miller Centre Prize for the year’s best journal-length American Studies essay for an article arising from this project.
In addition to a further monograph provisionally called ‘An End and a Beginning’: Modernism, the Great Crash, and the Poetics of History, which will be the first study of modernist responses to the 1929 stock market crash, Dr Crosthwaite is a co-investigator on an AHRC-funded exhibition project entitled ‘Show Me the Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present.’ The exhibition charts the ways in which artists have depicted the abstract domain of ‘the markets’, and Dr Crosthwaite has co-edited an essay collection of the same name with Dr Peter Knight (Manchester) and Professor Nicky Marsh (Southampton).
Alongside various articles published in the last three years on financial crisis, contemporary avant-garde writing, and economic criticism, these research activities make Dr Crosthwaite an expert on cultural representations of economic change and tumult. We are thus honored to have him give a keynote at Money Talks, and so helm what promises to be exciting day of discussion and debate around the topics of financial inequality and North American identity.
To register for this conference, visit the University of Nottingham online shop before the 5th June 2015. Registration is only £10.
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