Rachel Potter

2021- ongoing: UOAC 27

2021 and 2022: Director of Research

2021 - ongoing: I sit on LDC promotions Committee

2016- present: Head of Modern and Contemporary Literature Research Group

2017: Director of LDC Research 

2012-2015: Deputy Head of School in LDC

2011-2012: Associate Dean for Admissions in HUM Faculty

Rachel directs the Modern and Contemporary Research Group in LDC. She ran the AHRC project on 'The Impact of Non-Governmental Writers' Organisations on Freedom of Expression' and organised its associated conferences, websites and activities. 

Modernist literature and culture; women's writing and feminism; the history of literary censorship and freedom of expression; the history of writers' organisations; the cultural cold war

Rachel completed her PhD at King's College, Cambridge, where she also studied for her undergraduate degree.  Prior to her PhD she took the MA in 'Critical Theory' at the University of Sussex. Before joining UEA in September, 2007, she taught for seven years at Queen Mary, University of London.

She has supervised a large number of PhD students on a wide range of topics connected to modernist literature and culture, as well as literary censorship and freedom of speech.

Anglo-American modernist literature; early twentieth century cultural history; modernism and censorship; free speech.

Rachel Potter’s main research interests lie in the areas of modernist literature and early twentieth-century culture. She is the author of Obscene Modernism: Literary Censorship and Experiment 1900-1940 (OUP, 2013), The Edinburgh Guide to Modernist Literature (EUP, 2012), and Modernism and Democracy: Literary Culture 1900-1930 (OUP, 2006). She has also co-edited Prudes on the Prowl: Fiction and Obscenity in England 1850-the present (OUP, 2013) and The Salt Companion to Mina Loy (Salt, 2010), as well as three special editions of Critical Quarterly. Her new research project is a study of literature, internationalism and free speech 1921-1948, with a particular focus on the role of non-governmental writers' organisation, International P.E.N..