Pod Academy

Christopher Daley: These days we are used to hearing about the power of banks, GDP percentages, hedge funds, shareholders, stock market reports, house prices, the business cycle, deficits, debts, surpluses – but has it always been this way? Has money and finance always been such a prominent focal point for the popular consciousness? And if so, how has the representation of money changed and what does this tell us about our society? To try to explore some of these questions, I went to speak with Professor Nicky Marsh from the University of Southampton, who has published widely on the interactions between finance, literature and popular culture. I started by asking how she became interested in this line of research. Nicky Marsh: It was actually visual culture that looped me into it, although it has taken me a long time to get back to that. So when I think about the moment, I had been working on questions of publics, counterpublics and politics and gender for a long time and I had been working on, in my teachi