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Professor James Martin

Staff details

Professor James Martin

Position

Professor of Political Theory

Department

Politics and International Relations

Email

j.martin (@gold.ac.uk)

James Martin is a political theorist interested in culture and conflict in modern politics

James has published books and articles on European (particularly Italian) political thought, and on public speech and rhetoric as a medium of political action.

Academic qualifications

  • PhD on the political thought of Antonio Gramsci. University of Bristol 1994
  • MA in Political Thought. University of Kent 1989
  • BA (Hons), Politics and Sociology. University of East Anglia 1988

Research interests

James' academic work concentrates on modern political culture and conflict, particularly as expressed in political ideas and arguments. In his early research, he explored this theme in relation to Gramscian traditions of political theory, and to other Italian and European thinkers. He later focussed on the analysis of public speech (see his book, Politics and Rhetoric, published in 2014). In 2013-15, he was a Leverhulme Research Fellow in a project examining the relation between affects and political rhetoric. That led to his book, Psychopolitics of Speech (2019), which drew on psychoanalysis to understand rhetoric as a means of cultural-political intervention. Recently, he has written a short book, Hegemony (2022), on the uses of that concept in political theory. Between 2010 and 2020, James convened the Rhetoric, Discourse and Politics Specialist Group of the UK Political Studies Association.

Featured publications

Publications and research outputs

Book

Martin, James. 2022. Hegemony. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN 9781509521616

Martin, James. 2019. Psychopolitics of Speech: Uncivil Discourse and the Excess of Desire. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag. ISBN 9783837639193

Martin, James. 2013. Politics and Rhetoric: A Critical Introduction. Oxon: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-70667-4

Edited Book

Martin, James; Atkins, Judi; Finlayson, Alan and Turnbull, Nick, eds. 2014. Rhetoric in British Politics and society. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781137325525

Martin, James, ed. 2013. Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony, Radical Democracy, and the Political. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-82522-1

Martin, James, ed. 2008. The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism, Law, and the State. London: Verso. ISBN 978 1 84467 199 1

Book Section

Martin, James. 2024. Expressivity in Rhetoric. In: Daniel Gutzmann and Katharina Turgay, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Expressivity in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Martin, James. 2022. Marx's Rhetoric. In: Dilip Gaonkar and Keith Topper, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Rhetoric and Political Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190220945

Martin, James. 2018. Rhetoric and the Emotions. In: Andreas Hetzel and Gerald Posselt, eds. Handbuch Rhetorik und Philosophie [Handbook of Rhetoric and Philosophy]. 9 Germany: Walter De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 607-623. ISBN 978-3-11-031819-7

Article

Martin, James and Newman, Saul. 2023. Recontesting the Sacred: political theology as ideological method. Journal of Political Ideologies, ISSN 1356-9317

Martin, James. 2023. Rhetoric, death, and the politics of memory. Critical Discourse Studies, 20(5), pp. 477-490. ISSN 1740-5904

Martin, James. 2022. Rhetoric, Discourse and the Hermeneutics of Public Speech. Politics, 42(2), pp. 170-184. ISSN 0263-3957

Other

Martin, James. 2020. Facing The Enemy: Is Wartime Language Useful For Fighting Coronavirus? (Video intervention). Huffington Post.

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