My main research interests can be separated into two areas. Firstly, I am interested in the global history of marketing and, in particular, of the advertising industry. I wrote my PhD at Birkbeck College (University of London) on the emergence of a service- and consumer-oriented advertising industry in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. In the thesis, I looked at how the British advertising industry in the early twentieth century responded to the challenges of the mass market, advertising criticism and the growing competition from American ad agencies. With regards to the politics of the advertising industry, I also study the cross-links between Cold War cultures and the European advertising industries. My second field of interest is the history and the various socio-political uses of market and consumer research. In this respect, I have begun a new research project on the Austro-American ‘consumer guru’ Ernest Dichter and I am working on a historical-political analysis of the idea of consumer sovereignty.

Stefan Schwarzkopf: “The consumer as ‘voter’, ‘judge’ and ‘jury’: historical origins and political consequences of a marketing myth”, in: Journal of Macromarketing, Vol. 31, No. 1 (March 2011), pp. 8-18. Stefan Schwarzkopf: “Marketing, realism and reality: a plea for putting more ‘ideology’ into historical research in marketing”, in: Journal of Macromarketing, Vol. 31, No. 1 (March 2011), pp. 105-108. Stefan Schwarzkopf: “The political theology of consumer sovereignty: towards an ontology of consumer society”, in: Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2011), pp. 106 - 129 (2011). Stefan Schwarzkopf: “Ernest Dichter, motivation research and the making of the disembedded consumer”, in: European Advances in Consumer Research, Vol. 9 (2011), ed. by A. Bradshaw, P. Maclaran and C. Hackley. Duluth, MN [forthcoming]. Stefan Schwarzkopf: “The statisticalization of the consumer in British market research, c. 1920-1960: profiling a good society”, in: Tom Crook and Glen O’Hara (eds.), Numbers and the People: Statistics and the Public Sphere in Modern Britain, c.1750- c.1950. London: Routledge, 2011, pp. 144-162. Stefan Schwarzkopf: “A radical past? The political history of market research in Great Britain, 1900-1950”, in: Kerstin Brückweh (ed.), The Voice of the Citizen Consumer: a History of Market Research, Consumer Movements, and the Political Public Sphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 29-50. Stefan Schwarzkopf: “Managing the unmanageable: the professionalisation of market and consumer research in postwar Europe”, in: Ralph Jessen (ed.), Retailing in Europe after 1945. Ashgate: Aldershot, 2011 [forthcoming].