School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies

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Tracey Potts

Assistant Professor in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Arts

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Biography

I am Assistant Professor in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies. Before joining the University of Nottingham in 2005, I taught Cultural Studies at Staffordshire University.

I gained my BA (Hons) in English with Women's Studies from Wolverhampton Polytechnic, my MA in Interdisciplinary Women's Studies and my PhD in English Literature from the University of Warwick. In 2013-14, I was Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford.

Expertise Summary

My research is interdisciplinary and is focused in the areas of material culture, aesthetics and everyday life, with a particular emphasis on the conjunction of taste, class, space and affect. My broader interests include: design history, contemporary craft, new materialisms and ecology.

Research Summary

I am currently finishing a single-authored book: Neither Use Nor Ornament: A Cultural Biography of Clutter and Procrastination.

I am also working on a major project, which aims to reconstruct a rare prototype of Buckminster Fuller's Geoscope, built here at Nottingham in the 1960s.

Selected Publications

  • HOLLIDAY, R. and POTTS, T.J., 2012. Kitsch!: cultural politics and taste Manchester University Press.
  • POTTS, T.J., 2010. Life Hacking and Everyday Rhythm. In: EDENSOR, T., ed., Geographies of Rhythm Ashgate. 33-44
  • POTTS, T.J., 2010. Creative destruction and critical creativity: recent episodes in the social life of gnomes. In: EDENSOR, T., LESLIE, D., MILLINGTON, S. and RANTISI, N., eds., Spaces of vernacular creativity: rethinking the cultural economy Routledge. 155-169
  • POTTS, T.J., 2007. ‘Walking the Line’: Kitsch, class and the morphing subject of value Nottingham: Nottingham Modern Languages Press. Available at: <http://mlpa.nottingham.ac.uk/archive/00000071/>

Past Research

I have published articles on a wide range of subjects, including dark tourism, clutter and hoarding, feminist science studies, critical animal studies, and (last but not least) garden gnomes. I wrote the Popular Culture chapter for The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory from 2017-2019. Most recently, I have published a catalogue essay, 'Kitsch Revisited' (with Ruth Holliday), for the exhibition 'A Question of Taste', Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation, Istanbul

My co-authored book Kitsch! Cultural Politics and Taste (with Ruth Holliday) recently featured on BBC4's Thinking Allowed: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003jhs.

  • TRACEY POTTS, 2015. Tidy House, Tidy Mind? Nonhuman Agency in the Hoarding Situation Subjectivity. 8(2), 102-123
  • HOLLIDAY, R. and POTTS, T.J., 2012. Kitsch!: cultural politics and taste Manchester University Press.
  • POTTS, T. J., 2012. 'Dark tourism' and the 'kitschification' of 9/11 Tourist Studies. 12(3), 232-249
  • POTTS, T.J., 2010. Life Hacking and Everyday Rhythm. In: EDENSOR, T., ed., Geographies of Rhythm Ashgate. 33-44
  • POTTS, T.J., 2010. Creative destruction and critical creativity: recent episodes in the social life of gnomes. In: EDENSOR, T., LESLIE, D., MILLINGTON, S. and RANTISI, N., eds., Spaces of vernacular creativity: rethinking the cultural economy Routledge. 155-169
  • POTTS,T.J., 2007. Orchestrating chaos: clutter, rhythm and everyday life Key Words: A journal of cultural materialism. 5, 88-105
  • POTTS, T.J., 2007. ‘Walking the Line’: Kitsch, class and the morphing subject of value Nottingham: Nottingham Modern Languages Press. Available at: <http://mlpa.nottingham.ac.uk/archive/00000071/>
  • POTTS.T.J., 2007. Crying the wrong tears: floral tributes and aesthetic judgement Nottingham Modern Languages Press. Available at: <http://mlpa.nottingham.ac.uk/archive/00000072/>
  • POTTS, T.J., 2005. Creating "Modern Tendencies": the symbolic economics of furnishing. In: BELL, D. and HOLLOWS, J., eds., Historicizing lifestyle: mediating taste, consumption and identity from the 1900s to 1970s Aldershot: Ashgate. 156-172

School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies

University Park
Nottingham, NG7 2RD

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