Clare Birchall

Clare Birchall is Professor of Contemporary Culture at King's College London's Department of English within the Faculty of Arts & Humanities. Her research focuses on contested knowledges, digital culture, and the politics of visibility. She has led major research projects funded by AHRC and CHANSE examining conspiracy theories, disinformation, and digital surveillance.

Birchall's research explores how digital technologies transform political discourse and cultural production, with particular attention to conspiracy theories as cultural phenomena. She investigates how transparency and secrecy function in datafied societies, examining tensions between open information and privacy rights.

Her publications demonstrate sustained engagement with digital epistemology and political communication, consistently examining how online environments reshape knowledge production. Recent work analyzes pandemic misinformation ecosystems and algorithmic amplification of conspiracy narratives.

Birchall actively supervises PhD students working on material secrecies in literature, representations of torture in media, and raced subjectivities in television. She serves on editorial boards for Cultural Studies, Media Theory, and New Formations, and engages public audiences through media commentary and gallery talks.