Dr Jonathan Potter

• Nineteenth-century fiction
• Nineteenth-century periodicals
• Media history
• Researcher writing support

• PhD English Literature, University of Leicester
• MA Humanities and English, University of Leicester
• BA (Hons) English Literature, University of Leicester

Jonathan teaches on:

• Voices of Birmingham
• Writing and Environment
• Literature and Conflict
• The Victorians

• Jonathan is currently working on a monograph building on the AHRC funded project Thinking Machines: Constructing Knowledge in the Victorian Periodical. This monograph investigates the constellations of knowledge created and disseminated by mass-market periodicals and shows how, why, and to what effect, certain kinds of knowledge gained dominance.

• Jonathan has two major research interests. First, he is interested in the discursive formations surrounding media technologies such as the panorama, the magic lantern, stereoscopes and photography, and how these discourses influence the ways people think about, write about, and experience perception. Secondly, Jonathan’s work examines the development of mass culture in the nineteenth century, particularly the role of the periodical press in the commercialization of the public sphere and in the construction of “social” or “abstract” space.

• Jonathan welcomes doctoral research proposals on nineteenth-century literature, especially those relating to periodicals or media history.

• ‘Mary Russell Mitford’s “Our Village” and the Development of the Professional Periodical Writer’, Women’s Writing, 32, no. 1 (2025): 44-65. Published open access here.
  
  
• ‘Interpreters of the Real: Poems about Photographs in the Periodical Press, 1840–1860’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 29, no. 3, (2024): 415–429. Published open access here.
  
  
• “Humanity invested with a new form”: the Post Office and the Hospital in Household Words c.1850’, RRR,  no. 3 (2021): 59-75. Published open access here. 
  
  
• ‘Picture Stories, 1840-1860, or Problems with Photographs’, Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, 2, no. 2 (2020): 59-75. Published open access here.
  
  
• Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Seeing, Thinking Writing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) https://palgrave.com/gb/book/9783319897363.
  
  
• “Visuality”, Victorian Literature and Culture, 46, nos. 3-4 (2018): 933-937 https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001225.
  
  
• ‘The Stereoscope and Popular Fiction: Imagination and Narrative in the Victorian Home, Journal of Victorian Culture, 21, no. 3 (2016): 346-362 https://doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2016.1192559.

• Bluesky