Professor Patrick Wright

Biography

"Professor Patrick Wright joined King’s in September 2011, having previously been Professor of Modern Cultural Studies at Nottingham Trent University and, from 2004, a fellow of the London Consortium. Before 2000, Professor Wright lived for many years as a self-employed writer. While researching and writing books, he also worked as a journalist (including a five year spell as a feature writer with the Guardian), and as a broadcaster, writing and presenting radio and television documentaries for the BBC and Channel Four. These included a four-part television history of the Thames (“The River”, BBC2, 1999). Patrick also presented BBC Radio Three’s Arts programme “Night Waves” over a period of approximately five years. Professor Wright started out with an interest in modernist poetics, which he studied as a post-graduate student in Vancouver, and has since concentrated on exploring the broader material influence of various cultural (if not always literary) forms in the modern period. Patrick has written about the changing concept of heritage, the idea of China as it has featured in the British imagination, the literary origins and symbolic powers of the tank, and the development of the “Iron Curtain” as a divisive political metaphor that actually started out in the theatre."

Research Interest

The cultural dimension of modern politics and international relations: narratives, metaphors and other symbolic devices; Englishness and the ongoing reconfiguration of the British state; wider question of national cultures as they stand in relation to cosmopolitanism and globalization; Heritage, identity, and the modern experience of historicity; The literature of place: settlement and mobility; London’s East.