Contact
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. 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
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.