I joined York St John in March 2021 and have been based within the Teaching and Learning Enhancement (TLE) Team since October that year. My role involves coordinating the core activities of the TLE office, including our accredited Fellowship scheme, as well as supporting projects across key areas of the University strategy. I am also co-convener of York St John's ongoing Discussing Decolonisation event series and reading group, together with Dr Laura Key, with whom I currently co-chair the University's Anti-Racism and Decolonisation Community of Praxis.
My academic background is in literature and politics, with particular interests in materialist approaches to postcolonial and world-literary criticism. My doctoral work sought to read world-literature in relation to capitalist world-ecology and the world-food-system. Although I withdrew from my PhD before completion, I have published research on world-literary plantation regimes (Palgrave, 2021), the intersection of postcolonial studies and the energy humanities (Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2017), and on neoliberal Britain's austerity foodscape (New Formations, 2013).
I have long-standing interests in anti-racism and, for the past five years, have been part of a grassroots abolitionist movement campaigning for racial justice in and across the UK education system. This activist work has contributed to my growing interests in radical anti-racist pedagogies and other emancipatory approaches to and within compulsory as well as higher education.
- BA (Hons) English and Politics — First Class Honours with Distinction (University of York, 2011)
- MA Culture and Thought after 1945 — Masters with Distinction (University of York, 2012)
I am not currently active in research but have several publications as a result of my postgraduate and doctoral work, including a peer-reviewed journal article, an edited book chapter and a co-edited special issue:
- Potter, L. and Lambert, S. (2021). '“To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution”: Dialectical aesthetics in Miguel Ángel Asturias’ Banana Trilogy (1950–1960)'. In: Campbell, C., Niblett, M. and Oloff, K. (eds), Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76155-4_8
This chapter examines the violent history of the Guatemalan banana frontier through an analysis of Miguel Angel Asturias’ Banana Trilogy (1950–1960). Employing a world-ecological lens, we argue that the trilogy formally registers and resists the latent accumulation of “negative value” that underwrites the Latin American plantation regime and drives the cyclical and cumulative crises of the capitalist world-food-system.
- Potter, L. (2017). 'Postcolonial resources, pedagogical resistance: An energy-driven interview with Professor Jennifer Wenzel'. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 53(3): 380–392. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2017.1340863
This special issue emerged from the University of York 'Resistant Resources' lecture series, co-organised by the editors in Spring 2015, as an outgrowth of the Postcolonial Studies Association's 2014 'Resources of Resistance' conference hosted at York the previous year. In compiling the issue, we developed a shared understanding of what we termed “energetic materialism”, and considered the resourcefulness and resistive potential of “worlded” approaches to literary-cultural criticism, among other forms materialist scholarship that remain committed to systemic transformation.
- Potter, L. and Westall, C. (2013). 'Neoliberal Britain's austerity foodscape: Home economics, veg patch capitalism and culinary temporality'. New Formations, 80(80): 155-178. https://journals.lwbooks.co.uk/newformations/vol-2013-issue-80/abstract-8599/
This article examines the 'austerity aesthetic' of British food culture as it came to the fore during the 'Great British Summer' of 2012. We consider a range of food media and related cultural forms, including TV series, cookbooks, magazines, televisual events and media reporting, arguing that Britain's 'foodscape' consistently fuels and reveals the self-contradictory yet self-perpetuating logic of capital as manifest in the neoliberal enterprise of state-led austerity.
Since 2023/24, I have been co-convening the ongoing Discussing Decolonisation event series and reading group at York St John, as well as our Anti-racism and Decolonisation Community of Praxis (ARDP).
In this time, I have also collaborated with colleagues across the UK to set up a new UK-wide Decolonisation in Higher Education (HE) network, which was launched in December 2025/26 and continues to develop and grow. I currently co-lead the network's International Solidarity and Grassroots Activism subgroups, and also co-chair our Reading and Discussion group.
For the past few years, I have also been co-convener of RIPPLE (Research into Professional Practice in Learning and Education), and an ongoing and active member of the Ecological Justice Research Group (EJRG). In 2024/25, I helped establish the University's new Sustainability and Environment Community of Practice (SECoP), and remain part of the core organising group.
I am currently working towards Advance HE Fellowship via our accredited institutional scheme.
