Dr Simon Potter

Reader in Modern History

Office: G.57, 13 Woodland Road

Phone: +44 (0)117 928 8117

Research interests

Much of my published work has focused on the history of the mass media in the British empire. My early research examined the role played by newspapers and news agencies in linking up the component parts of the ‘British world’ (Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More recently, I have written on the role of the BBC in building and strengthening imperial connections since 1922, and its response to the decline of the British world after the Second World War. I am also interested in the broader history of the British world, and in the historiography of the British empire.

Research Supervision

I welcome research proposals on the political and cultural history of the British world, and on the history of the mass media in Britain and the British world. Please get in touch if you would like to discuss your research plans.

Teaching

I teach courses on the history of the British empire and the British world; decolonization; the South African War; and the media in the English-speaking world.

Selected publications

Broadcasting Empire: the BBC and the British world, 1922-1970 (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2012)

‘“Invasion by the Monster”: transnational influences on the establishment of ABC television, 1945-1956’, Media History, 17/3 (2011), 253-271

‘What Did you Do in the War, Professor? Imperial history and propaganda, 1939-45’ in Robert Blyth and Keith Jeffery (eds.), The British Empire and its Contested Pasts (Irish Historical Studies XXVI, Irish Academic Press, Dublin and Portland OR, 2009), 24-44

‘Who Listened when London Called? Reactions to the BBC Empire Service in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, 1932-1939’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 28:4 (October 2008), 475-87

‘Webs, Networks, and Systems: globalization and the mass media in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century British empire’, Journal of British Studies, 46 (July 2007), 621-46

‘Richard Jebb, John S. Ewart, and the Round Table, 1898-1926’, English Historical Review, CXXII, 495 (February 2007), 105-32

‘The Imperial Significance of the Canadian-American Reciprocity Proposals of 1911’, Historical Journal, 47, 1 (March 2004), 81-100

News and the British World: the emergence of an imperial press system, 1876-1922 (Oxford University Press, 2003)

Full publications

Full list of Dr Simon Potter's publications since 1991 held in the University's IRIS publications database.

Note: some of the documents on this page are in PDF format. In order to view a PDF you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader

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