Research Interests: |
I am curently a PhD candidate focusing on the origins of the celebrity interview in the nineteenth century. Contrary to what has previously been maintained, I do not believe that the interview was an American import, or invention. I am looking at the development of psychology, crime detection, parliamentary debate, adversarial legal practice and philanthropic enterprises to trace the format of the questionnaire, the survey, the means testing form and the public fascination with asking strangers questions to form a blueprint of their identity and social status. As a student of the Victorian press, I will be looking at how these genres solidified to become the press interview at the end of the century. |