Dr Nicholas Holm PhD, MA, BA(Hons)

Nick joined the School of English and Media Studies in 2013, having completed his doctorate at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada in 2012. He apparently has trouble keeping his research interests in check, but when forced will suggest that he studies the political nature of popular culture, in particlar the role of humour as an aesthetic category, and the interrelation of aesthetic theory, political economics and popular culture. He also likes to write about animals that nobody else likes. His recent projects include an investigation of boredom as a bureacratic aesthetic, an exploration of the vilifcation of feral cats, and an analysis of racial joking of Trevor Noah over the course of his transnational career. His major publications include a monograph on the political function of contemporary humour (Humour as Politics, 2017) and a textbook about the critical study of advertising in 2016. He was the conference director of the 2017 meeting of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia and the 2018 Feral online-only conference.

Nick is the co-ordinator for the Wellington internal and distance versions of Adverting and Consumer Society (154.202), the Wellington offering coordinator of Popular Culture and the Media (154.203), Humour and the Media (154.333) and the co-coordinator for the core course for the Masters of Communication, The Communication Field (154.721). He is interested in supervising, or just chatting about, any projects addressing humour (and related concepts of parody, satire, irony and comedy), advertising, aesthetic theory, Avant Garde-ism, Cultural Marxism, comic books, cultural studies more broadly or any combination of the above.