Background 

Niall Martin is an Assistant Professor in the department of Literary and Cultural Analysis and former coordinator of the Research Masters Cultural Analysis.

After completing an ASCA-funded Ph.D in 2012,  he was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship by the ACGS to work on a project titled: 'London's Demons: Noise in the Global City'.

This research is incorporated in his book  Iain Sinclair: Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London (Bloomsbury, 2015). 

Current research 

Niall is currently working on a project titled 'Noise Worlds: reading Globalisation Through Noise'  which extends his earlier research on noise to examine the different ways in which concepts of noise interact with and produce our ideas of globalisation.

He is also working on the topic of il/literacy and is interested in the ways in which the construction of the il/literate extends questions of decolonisation into discussions of semiosis and new materialism.

His most recent publication is a volume, co-edited with Ilios Willemars, on the concept of 'replaceability': The Replaceability Paradigm: Replacement and Irreplaceability from Dante to DeepDream

Niall has also published on the topics of:

Disorientation

Waste

Thermal Imaginaries

Documentary and the aesthetics of precarity

Cultural analysis

Biosemiotics and Sylvia Wynter

A selection of articles and conference papers are available  here.  

Teaching 

In the academic year 2024-2025 Niall is teaching and or coordinating the following courses.

Il/literacy Matters: Spaces, Bodies, Species

Living On: How to survive the 21st Century Equipped Only with a Humanities Degree

Moving Images (coordinator)

Niall is teaching, or has taught, tutorials on the topics of:

Biosemiotics; Noise; Acid Communism; Marxism and Decolonisation

Office hours by appointment. 

In the current academic year Niall is teaching:

Il/literacy Matters: Spaces, Bodies, Species

Living On: How to survive the 21st Century Equipped Only with a Humanities Degree

Moving Images (coordinator)

Niall has previoulsy taught on the following courses: 

Objects of Cultural Analysis

Politics of the Contemporary 

Research Seminar for RMA Cultural Analysis

Global Literacy

Cultural Conflicts

Inleiding Literatuurwetenschap

Literature and Film

Sleutelbegrippen

'Against Culture: Radical Theory from the Situationists to the Present'  

Literaire Werelden: 'Gilgamesh'; 'Magical Realism'.

Tekstanalyse: 'Lyric' 

Zeven Meesterwerken: 'Ulysses'
 

Current Research: 'Noise Worlds: Reading Globalisation Through Noise'  

This project examines the different ways in which concepts of noise interact with and produce our ideas of globalisation. 

Post-doctoral Research: 'London's Demons: Noise in the Global City' 

In this project I examine the nexus between London as a neoliberal city and globalization through the concept of noise. Specifically the project investigates the paradoxical objects and spaces that emerge when we think of noise as both an obstacle to, and the precondition of, communication.  
These objects range from the geographical and topographical spaces that are constructed through the intersection of mutually incomprehensible languages, to the global city itself which as a transnational entity is constituted as both a space of homogeneity and of heterogeneity.

Ph.D Research: 'Noise, Neoliberalism and Iain Sinclair'

This project focused 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. Supervisor: Prof. dr. M.D. Rosello

The project is affiliated with the ASCA Cities Project

A selection of articles and conference papers are available here. 

Conference Papers, Presentations and Invited Lectures

'On Beckton Alp: Garbage and (Ob)scenery in Iain Sinclair and Stanley Kubrick' . Global Garbage Conference. Centre for the Study of European and North African Relations (SENAR), University of London Institute in Paris, June 12-13, 2014.

'Becoming Shameless: Shame, shamelessness and the embarrassments of post-ideological subjectivity'. Leiden University Lectures in Media, Art & Politics. Invited lecture. 2014.

'This is a Muslim area: Virality, Parasitism and the Vigilantism of the Other'. The Lisbon Consortium, Summer School for the study of Culture 2013.   

'The Viscerality of the Other: Disoriented consumption in Marc Isaacs' All White in Barking'.International Workshop 'Disorientation', 15 June, 2012, UVA.  

'Unacknowledged Cities: Modernity and Acknowledgement in the work of China Miéville and Marc Isaacs'. International Conference 'Questioning Urban Modernity' 18 May, 2012, UVA. (Programme)

'"[A] more generous sentence": economies of the unpoetic in Iain Sinclair's Lud Heat' . International Conference 'Poetry and the Unpoetic'  20-21 May 2011, UVA.   

'Misrecognition and Re-forgetting in Iain Sinclair's Edge of the Orison .' ASCA Workshop and International Conference, March 2010, UVA.  

Conference Organisation

Co-organiser of the ASCA 2011 International Conference and Workshop: 'Imagining, Resisting, Remembering' with keynote speakers: Meltem Ahiska, Ed Cohen, Lawrence Grossberg, Jacques Rancière.