People

Network coordinators

Anat Rosenberg is a senior lecturer at the Harry Radzyner Law School, Reichman University, Israel. Her work concerns the cultural legal history of capitalism, liberalism and consumption in Britain, and methodologies of law and the humanities. She is author of Liberalizing Contracts: Nineteenth Century Promises Through Literature, Law and History (2018), and The Rise of Mass Advertising: Law, Enchantment and the Cultural Boundaries of British Modernity (forthcoming).

Kristof Smeyers is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ruusbroec Institute, University of Antwerp. His research interests are magic, the supernatural and the occult, and their connections to the histories of religion, science and folklore, as well as their historiography and their archive history.

Astrid Van den Bossche is Lecturer in Digital Marketing and Communications at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. She is particularly interested in scepticism and humour as forms of engagement with promotional culture, and the application of computational methods in historical studies.

Fellow travelers

Rachel Bowlby FBA, Professor of Comparative Literature at University College London, is the author of several books on consumer culture, including Just Looking (on nineteenth-century department stores); Shopping with Freud; Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (on supermarkets and self-service); Talking Walking; and most recently, Back to the Shops, forthcoming in 2021.

Richard Hornsey is Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Nottingham. He is a cultural historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century urban Britain. He is the author of The Spic and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London (2010). He is currently writing a book entitled The Wonderland of Common Things: England in the Age of Mass Production.

Peter Knight is a professor of American Studies at the University Manchester (and currently a visiting professor at Leiden University). He is the author of three monographs, including Reading the Market: Genres of Financial Capitalism in Gilded Age America (2016).

Stefan Schwarzkopf is Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He devotes most of his research to the question of how markets became pervasive socio-technological-economic arrangements. His work has been appeared in journals such as Business History, the Journal of Cultural Economy, the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, and Marketing Theory.

Usva Seregina (PhD) is a visual artist and an interdisciplinary researcher, with their work encompassing such fields as consumer research, sociology, anthropology, performance studies, and art education. Seregina is actively developing art-based and performance-based research methodologies and has previously published a book on the role of fantasy in consumer culture.

James Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in History at Lancaster University. He has written widely on the development of the corporate economy in Britain since 1720, particularly from cultural and legal perspectives. His third book is Boardroom Scandal: The Criminalization of Company Fraud in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2013).

Daniel Pick is Professor of History and a psychoanalyst, and is leading a research group at Birkbeck entitled Hidden Persuaders: Brainwashing, Culture, Clinical Knowledge and the Cold War Human Sciences, c. 1950-1990.

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