Clare Birchall is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Middlesex University in London.

She has published widely in journals including Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Mediactive and New Formations, and in edited collections such as Peter Knight’s Conspiracy Nation (NYU, 2002).

She has published a monograph, Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip (2006) with Berg, and edited a collection entitled, New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (2006) with Gary Hall, with Edinburgh University Press.

She completed her PhD at the University of Sussex, working with Geoff Bennington, her thesis was titled "Conspiracy Theory as a Hyperreal Discourse". At this point she was interested in the convergences between conspiracy theory and other discourses, guided by a working assumption that conspiracy theory can exacerbate the operations of discourses which have more accepted processes of legitimation. She approached the notion of conspiracy from a Derridean perspective in the attempt to reassess Baudrillard's theory of the hyperreal in a way that does not romanticise the "real". She considered a number of case studies discussing the formation of a fashionable and contemporary epistemology, but also reflected on "conspiracy theory" as an abstract concept.

Online References

• 'Just Because You're Paranoid, Doesn't Mean They're Not Out to Get You', Culture Machine, 2004