Claire Potter
Emeritus Professor
Email
claire.potter@newschool.edu
Office Location
A - 66 West 12th Street
Profile
I am a Professor Emerita of History at The New School for Social Research and past co-executive Editor of Public Seminar, a digital magazine of politics and culture based at The New School. My main research and teaching areas are in United States political history after 1970, the history of gender and sexuality, mass culture, media and internet Studies. My most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Stole Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020). My other books, edited collections and articles can be found at my website, clairepotter.com.
In addition to my scholarship, I contribute to broader public conversations in the digital and legacy media, where good history can help inform the public about critical issues of the day. From 2011 to 2015, I blogged at The Chronicle of Higher Education. I have also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Bulwark, Dissent, The Village Voice, Inside Higher Education, berfrois, review31, and Jacobin.
My teaching reflects my scholarly commitments: to well-researched, accessibly written history; to historical writing that matters beyond the academy; to feminist and queer activist research; and to helping young historians acquire the methodological and technical tools they need to research and write the past in a twenty-first century digital world.
I am represented by Roz Foster at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, New York City.
Degrees Held
Ph.D., History, New York University M.A., History, New York University B.A., English, Yale University
Recent Publications
Books
New York Media Woman: A Biography of Susan Brownmiller (proposal currently under consideration by Basic Books)
Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy, Basic Books, 2020
War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men and the Politics of Mass Culture, Rutgers University Press, 1998
Edited Collections
With Renee Romano, Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America's Past, Rutgers University Press, 2018.
With Renee Romano, Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back, University of Georgia Press, 2012
Selected Articles and Book Chapters
“Has the University Always Been `Neoliberal?’” Labor: Studies in Working Class History, v. 18 no. 4 (December 2021).
"The Only Way to Save Higher Education Is to Make It Free," The New York Times, June 5, 2020.
"Men Invented Likeability. Guess Who Benefits." The New York Times, May 4, 2019.
"Sexual harassment is about power. Why not fight it as we do bullying?" The Guardian, February 10, 2018.
“Public Figures, Private Lives: Eleanor Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover and a Queer History Without Sexual Identity,” in Leila Rupp and Susan K. Freeman, Ed., Understanding and Teaching U.S. Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 199-212.
"Is it OK to Call Donald Trump Jr. a Boy" The Washington Post, July 24, 2017.
“When the Stars Come Out: Jodie Foster’s Queer Families and the Celebrity Private Sphere,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (winter, 2014).
“A Queer Public Sphere: Urban History’s Sexual Landscape,” Journal of Urban History, (July 2014).
“Thou Shalt Commit: The Internet, New Media, and the Future of Women’s History,” Journal of Women’s History vol. 25 no. 4 (Winter 2013), 350-362.
“Virtually a Historian: Blogs and the Recent History of Dispossessed Academic Labor,” Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques vol. 38. no. 2 (summer, 2012).
“Taking Back Times Square: Feminist Repertoires and the Transformation of Urban Space In Late Second Wave Feminism,” Radical History Review, issue 113 (spring, 2012).
“Paths to Political Citizenship: Feminism, Gay Rights and the Carter Presidency,” Journal of Policy History (winter 2011-12).
“Queer Hoover: Sex, Lies and Political History,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 15 no. 3 (September 2006). Awarded the 2007-08 Audre Lorde article prize by the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History (American Historical Association affiliate society).