Staff Profile
Lucy Potter
Teaching and Learning Enhancement Team Coordinator
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 (2021), the intersection of postcolonial studies and the energy humanities (2017), and on neoliberal Britain's austerity foodscape (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.
- Email – l.potter@yorksj.ac.uk
Further information
Academic qualifications
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)
Academic publications
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, pp. 163-190. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76155-4_8
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
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://doi.org/10.3898/NeWF.80/81.09.2013
Special issue, co-edited with Claire Westall (2017). 'Resistant Resources/Resources of Resistance: World-Literature, World-Ecology and Energetic Materialism'. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol. 53, Issue 3. https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjpw20/53/3?nav=tocList
Professional activities
For the past few years, I have been a 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.
Since 2023/24, I have been jointly leading 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). I am also now collaborating with colleagues across the UK and further afield to set up Decolonisation networks in Higher Education (HE) at both national and international levels, with the first meetings taking place in Autumn 2025/26.
I am currently working towards Advance HE Fellowship via our accredited institutional scheme.
