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School of Business and Management

Professor Nicholas O'Shaughnessy

Nicholas

Emeritus Professor of Communications

Email: n.j.oshaughnessy@qmul.ac.uk

Profile

Roles

  • Emeritus Professor of Communications

Biography

Professor Nicholas O'Shaughnessy is an Emeritus Professor of Communication at Queen Mary, University of London, having previously been Professor of Marketing at Brunel University and Professor of Marketing and Communication at Keele, Quondam Fellow of Hughes Hall Cambridge, and University Lecturer in Marketing at Cambridge University (1989-2000). Over the last fifteen years, his work has broadened within and beyond an original focus on political marketing to graduate into related territories of polemic and propaganda, with emotion and symbolisation as the underlying constructs; and with a particular focus on such themes as the ethics of negative advertising and the rise of symbolic government. Ultimately the concern is with the ‘engineering of consent’- the troubling matter of how public opinion can be manufactured, and governments elected, via sophisticated methodologies of persuasion developed in the consumer economy. His perspective has always been that persuasion is the hidden hand of history, its core dynamic. And certainly it is the case that propaganda has become again an important part of our global public and civic discourse. Such research interests may in the past have seemed marginal, or even anachronistic, but that cannot be said to-day. In an era of Trump, the online ‘Jihad’, Russian troll farms, Cambridge Analytica, the politicization of social media, the menace of disinformation or ‘fake news’, my research agenda has the merit of contemporary resonance. Future research aims continue to lie in this utterly fascinating area.

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