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Background
Niall Martin is a Ph.D. candidate at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). After completing a Research MA in LIterary Studies (cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam in 2007 he took up a position as Assistant in Opleiding (AIO) at ASCA where he began his research project, 'Noise, (Neo)Liberalism and the Poetics of Urban Space' in 2009.
Teaching
Niall has taught courses in Eighteenth-century British literature and culture at the University of Amsterdam; foundation courses in English literature and literary theory at the University of Edinburgh and British and American Modernism at the Scottish Universities International Summer School.
Research:
"The city makes noise, but noise makes the city": Noise, (Neo)Liberalism and the Poetics of Urban Space.
This project focuses on the concept of noise in relation to the production of space in neoliberal Britain with particular reference to the work of British writer and film-maker Iain Sinclair. Conceptualising noise as both an obstacle to, and precondition of, the production of meaning, the project notes classic liberalism's contradictory investment in the economies of noise. From a liberal perspective noise is at once that which must be eliminated from a system to ensure the smooth circulation of information, but at the same time, liberal theories of the market are predicated on the systems theory maxim that what is noise at one point in a system is information elsewhere in the same system
Arguing that urban space is a privileged site for the expression of this contradiction, the project explores the ways in which the concept of noise informs the representation of the city through such aesthetic categories as the urban sublime and the architectural uncanny. The project's primary focus is on the representation of London during the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s in the work of Iain Sinclair and Patrick Keiller, but constellates that concern with earlier articulations of noisy space in the work of Thomas de Quincey and John Clare.
This project is affiliated with the ASCA Cities Project
ASCA Cities Project