Sean Nixon

I have recently finished my third monograph, Hard Sell: Advertising, Affluence and Trans-Atlantic Relations circa 1951-69, published by Manchester University Press in May 2013. Hard Sell explores how American ideas and practices changed British advertising in the 1950s and 60s. In doing so, it tells the story of advertising in this period as part of a trans-Atlantic history of commercial change.

May 2013 also saw the publication of a second edition of the collection Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices, co-edited with Stuart Hall and Jessica Evans.

I am currently working on an Australian Research council funded project with colleagues at the University of Melbourne, UWS and Brown University. It explores the exporting of American advertising practices and techniques to Australia in the late twentieth century. I am focusing on the mediating role played by British advertising in this transfer of knowledge and expertise between the 'advanced' world of American advertising and the subaltern Australian industry. As a first step, I am researching the importing of the so-called 'creative revolution' associated with NY advertising in the 1950s and 60s into London advertising.