Ben Holgate, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Department of Comparative Literature, provides a round-up from the Cultural Finance Conference held in February 2020.
The Cultural Finance Conference explored how the two disciplines of literary criticism and economics / finance might ‘talk to’ one another. The theme of cultural finance is a new and emerging area of economics that explores how cultural norms interact with financial decision making.
Keynote speakers were Jonathan Haskel, Professor of Economics at Imperial College Business School, Imperial College London, and a member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (2018-2021), and Peter Hitchcock, Professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center and Baruch College. Hitchcock spent a week at the Mile End campus as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow, delivering also a Masterclass and Lecture. Other conference speakers included Dr Daniel Beunza (Cass Business School, City University of London), Dr Jesal Sheth (Banking Standards Board), Dr Jonathan Paine (Rothschild & Co), Professor Peter Knight (Manchester), Dr Paul Crosthwaite (Edinburgh) and Dr Alasdair King (QMUL).The conference was an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Department of Comparative Literature and the School of Economics and Finance, organised by Dr Ben Holgate (CL) and Professor Jason Sturgess (SEF). The event was generously funded by Queen Mary’s Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences’ Early Career Workshop Funding Scheme and Distinguished Visiting Fellowships Scheme.