Research interests

• Intersections between culture and economics
• Cultural representations of risk, money, finance, markets
• Gender, feminism and the economy 
• Literature, film, art, media and culture 

Current research

Nicky Marsh researches contemporary literature, media and culture with particular reference to economics and gender. Her work has examined the ways in which economic ideas - money, risk, credit, debt - have been given imaginary and cultural forms. She has been involved in three large projects. 

Firstly, she is widely published on fiction and finance. Her most recent monograph,Credit Culture: the Politics of Money in American Fiction of the 1970s (Cambridge University Press, 2020) critically examines the notion of postmodern money. It argues that writers such as Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo responded to the ending of the Gold Standard with a deeply historical and material analysis tha troubles received notions of this moment as the origin of a 'free floating' money for the postmodern era. Her newest solo project, on modernism, money and gender,  explores how writers such as Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Mina Loy, Elizabeth Bowen and Zora Neale Hurston treated money. The project is particularly interested in the ways in which these writers 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.

Secondly, she works collaboratively on thinking about finance's representations within the public sphere. She 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. The book of the project, Invested: How Three Centuries of Stock Market Advice Reshaped Our Minds, Money and Markets, was published by Chicago University Press in 2022.  

Finally, Nicky has begun exploring the connections between economics and culture in a series of place-based AHRC-funded projects. In Towns and the Cultural Economies of Recovery (2021) and Feeling Towns: Place and Identity in Local Governance (2022) she explores how culture is being used to imagine social regeneration and emphasises the roles that can be played by alternative models of economic and social growth and measurements.  

I teach twentieth century literature, film and visual culture. My interests are particularly in contemporary politics, gender, and economics. 

Nicky Marsh is a Professor of Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies. She is also the Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and the Director of Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities.