Professor Rachel Potter

Rachel Potter is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of East Anglia. She writes on literature and censorship, free expression and writers organisations, modernist literature and early twentieth century culture.

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. 

Her main research interests lie in the areas of modernist literature and 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 a number of books, including The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Literature and Politics (CUP, 2022), PEN: A Visual History (Thames and Hudson, 2021) and The British Novel of Ideas: George Eliot to Zadie Smith, which will be published with CUP in Autumn, 2024.

She is part of the project team for Writers and Free Expression, an AHRC-funded project exploring the global links between writers' organisations and freedom of expression.