Dr Jane Potter

Reader (Arts) & Postgraduate Research Tutor for Publishing, FEA

.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Twitter: @drjanepotter

Personal Profile

A Trustee of the Wilfred Owen Literary Estate, Jane is the author of Wilfred Owen: An Illustrated Life (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2014) and is currently working on a new edition of Owen's Selected Letters for Oxford University Press. With Ralf Schneider (University of Beilefeld) she is editing The Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War (forthcoming, deGruyter).

Academic and Professional Qualifications:

  • AB (English) Occidental College, Los Angeles
  • MA (Women’s Studies) University of York
  • M.Phil (Scottish Literature) University of St Andrews
  • M.St. Oxford University
  • D.Phil (English) Oxford University
  • PCTHE (Oxford Brookes University)

Employment Teaching:

Jan 2016-present

Reader (Arts), Oxford Brookes University

Jan 2003-2016

Senior Lecturer in Publishing, Oxford Brookes University

Jan 1999-Sept 2000

Senior Lecturer in Publishing, Oxford Brookes University

1995-2001

Tutorial teaching, Oxford University

Employment Publishing:

Jan - May 2003

Freelance archivist, Ian Fleming Publications Limited, London

1997-2005

Assistant to the Archivist, Wolfson College, Oxford

Mar-June 2002

Consultant Researcher, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth: Soldier Poets’, exhibition, Imperial War Museum, London, Oct. 2002-Apr. 2003

Sept 2000-Sept 2003

Research Editor, Literature (1780-2000), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Postgraduate Teaching

 Dissertation Research Methods

Research

Jane's research and teaching focuses on book and literary history. Her monograph Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women's Literary Responses to the Great War 1914-1918 (OUP 2005; paperback 2007) was joint winner of the 2006 Women’s History Network Book Prize and she has published widely on many aspects of war literature, book history, and women's writing. Her current research is a collaborative project with Dr Carol Acton (St. Jerome's, University of Waterloo, Canada) entitled Working in a World of Hurt: Trauma and Resilience in the Narratives of Medical Personnel in Warzones (Manchester University Press, 2015).

Immediate research projects                             

Selected Letters of Wilfred Owen (forthcoming, Oxford University Press) 

A Cambridge History of World War One Poetry (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press)

with Ralf Schneider, The Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War (forthcoming, deGruyter)

Editorships

Journal of Scholarly Publishing (Editorial Board)    

Membership of Professional Bodies

Fellow, The English Association

Advisory Panel, Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum

Advisory Board, Teaching and Learning War Research Network 

Books and other publications

' "Khaki and Kisses": Reading the Romance Novel in the Great War', Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts and Archives, eds. Shafquat Towheed and Edmund King (Palgrave, 2015) 

Wilfred Owen: An Illustrated Life (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2014)with Carol Acton: Working in a World of Hurt: Trauma and Resilience in the Narrative of Medical Personnel in Warzones (Manchester University Press, 2015)

Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women’s Literary Responses to the Great War, 1914-1918 (Oxford University Press, 2005; paperback 2008) JOINT WINNER OF WOMEN'S HISTORY NETWORK BOOK PRIZE 2006

Edited volumes and pamphlets 

Good Old Anna by Marie Belloc Lowndes, edited with an introduction by Jane Potter, British Literature of World War I series, edited by Andrew Maunder (Pickering & Chatto, 2010)

Three Great War Poets: Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen, eds. Jon Stallworthy & Jane Potter (Penguin Classics, 2011)

Wolfson College: A Short History, Frank Jessup with revisions by Stuart McKerrow & Jane Potter, (Oxford: Wolfson College, 1999)

Chapters

' "A Certain Poetess": Recuperating Jessie Pope', Landscapes and Voices of the Great War, eds. Angela K. Smith & Krista Cowman (Routledge, 2017)

'The Publishing Industry', The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts, eds. Ann-Marie Einhaus & Katherine Isobel Baxter (Edinburgh University Press, 2017)
 
‘“Khaki and Kisses”: Reading the Romance Novel in the Great War’, Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts and Archives, ECG King and Shafquat Towheed, eds. (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2015) 
 
‘I begin to feel as a normal being should, in spite of the blood and anguish in which I move’: American Women’s First World War Nursing Memoirs, First World War Nursing: Visions and Revisions, Alison Fell and Christine Hallett, eds. (Routledge, 2013)

'The Bookman, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Armistice', The Silent Morning: Memory, Culture and the Armistice November 1918, Kate Kennedy and Trudi Tate, eds. (Manchester University Press, 2013)

‘ “The essentially modern attitude toward war”: English Poetry of the Great War’, The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century English and American War Literature, eds. A. Piette and M. Rawlinson (Edinburgh University Press, 2012)

‘The Bible and the Poets of the Great War’, Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature, eds. R. Lemon, E. Mason, J. Roberts, C. Rowland (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)

'"Peace could not give back her dead": Women and the Armistice', A Part of History: Aspects of the British Experience of the First World War (Continuum, 2008)

‘For Country, Conscience & Commerce: Publishers and Publishing 1914-1918’, Publishing and the First World War:  Essays in Book History, M. Hammond & S. Towheed, eds. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 

‘Valiant Heroines and Peace-loving Ladies?: War, Gender and the Military in Modern Europe’, Routledge History of Women in Europe, since 1700, Deborah Simonton (ed.), (forthcoming, Routledge, 2005)

‘“A great purifier”: The Great War in Women’s Romances and Memoirs, 1914-1918’. Women’s Fiction and the Great War. Suzanne Raitt & Trudi Tate (eds) (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1997).

‘Hidden Drama by British Women’, Women, Drama and the Great War, Claire M. Tylee (ed.), (Edwin Mellen Press, 2000).

Journal Articles

‘“These frightful sights would work havoc with one’s brain”: subjective experience and trauma in First World War writings by medical personnel’, co-authored with Carol Acton, Literature and Medicine 30.1 (forthcoming 2012)

The Bookman, 1914-1918: A Record of Wartime Publishing’, Gutenberg Yearbook (2007)

‘Interview with Rayner Unwin’, Publishing History 41(1997), 75-101.

Reference Articles

‘Literature (British and Irish) of the First World War: Tradition and Modernism’, 1914-1918-Online, an International Encyclopedia of the First World War (forthcoming)

‘The Book in Wartime’ and ‘Literature’, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 7 (1914-present), Andrew Nash, Claire Squires and Ian Willison, eds. (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2014)

Entries for the Oxford Companion to the Book, Michael F. Suarez SJ & H.R. Woudhuysen, eds. Oxford: (Oxford University Press, 2010)

‘Jessie Pope’ & ‘May Wedderburn Cannan’, 90th anniversary of the Armistice release of Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2008)

Entries for The History of the Book in Scotland, vol. 4, D.Finkelstein & A. McCleery, eds. (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming, 2007)

'US Women on the Home Front during World War I'; 'Italian Women on the Home Front and in the Services during World War I'; 'May Wedderburn Canan', Women at War Encyclopedia, Bernard Cook, ed. (ABC-Clio, 2006)

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004)

Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature (London: Continuum, 2003), articles on Susan Ferrier, Marie Belloc Lowndes and Jon Stallworthy)

Research Dissemination

Selected conference papers given since 2010

'The War Illustrated: Depicting Africa in a Global War, 1914-1918', Print Culture and Colonisation in Africa, University of Cape Town, 28-29 May 2015

'The English girl, her magazines, and the Second Anglo-Boer War: Constructing national identity', Print Culture and the Nation, Oxford Brookes University, 13 March 2015

‘'A Strong Pillar in the Mighty Fabric of the British Empire': The Veldt Magazine, 1900-1903’, Print Networks in Africa Colloquium, Oxford Brookes University, 4 September 2014

'Wilfred Owen’s Letters: Shaping the Poetry, Shaping the Afterlife', British Poetry of the First World War, English Association Conference 2014, Wadham College, Oxford, 5-7 September 2014

' "I can find no word to qualify my experiences except the word SHEER": Wilfred Owen's Letters and his Baptisms of Fire', « Débuts, commencements, initiations : les ‘premières fois’ de la Grande Guerre », Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne, France, 29 June-2 July 2014

‘I am alone am left to tell the tale’: Nurses’ Literary Responses to the Great War, Nursing 1914-1918: War, Gender and Labour in an European Perspective, Ingolstadt, Germany, 22-24 May 2014

‘Women’s Poetry’, 'British' First World War Poetry, Spring School, Oxford, 3-5 April 2014

‘"The war was happily driven from their minds by the 'magic carpet' of some book"’: Reading Popular Fiction in the Great War, The Battle for Books, 20th Annual SHARP Conference, Dublin, 26-29 June 2012

'Advancing Medicine, Advancing Nation: Medical Textbooks and Health Care Manuals of the Great War', The Book in Art and Science, 19th Annual SHARP conference, Washington, D.C., 14-17 July 2011

'"A certain poetess": recuperating Jessie Pope', Books from Below, 18th Annual SHARP conference, Helsinki, Finland, 17-20 August 2010