Peter Knight

Peter Knight is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Manchester, and has held visiting fellowships at New York University, Harvard, Leiden University and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in Amsterdam.

An expert on conspiracy theories in American history, and the cultural history of economics and finance, Knight is the author and editor of a dozen books, including the prize-winning Reading the Market: Genres of Financial Capitalism in Gilded Age America (2016), and most recently the co-written books Invested: How Three Centuries of Stock Market Advice Reshaped Our Money, Markets and Minds (2022) and Conspiracy Theories in the Time of Covid-19 (2022). He was also one of the curators of the exhibition “Show Me the Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present.”

Knight is currently co-directing two large, international, team research projects on conspiracy theories in the age of the internet.