Maddy Potter

Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow in the Long Nineteenth Century (Romanticism/Victorianism)

Contact details

Address

Street

Room 2.06
21 Buccleuch Place

City
Edinburgh
Post code
EH8 9LN

Availability

  • Office Hour: Wednesday 9-10

Background

Before joining the University of Edinburgh, I was a research assistant at Edinburgh Napier University, and held a Barker Fellowship at Durham University. Prior to that, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Edge Hill University, supported by the British Association for Romantic Studies and the British Association for Victorian Studies, for my project 'Blood at Heaven's Gate: John Keble and Bram Stoker'. I was awarded my PhD at the University of York in 2020.

Undergraduate teaching

Great Victorian Novel

Vampire Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century

Edinburgh in Fiction

Literary Studies 2A

Literary Studies 2B

Research summary

My research investigates the intersections between literature and theology in nineteenth-century Gothic texts, with a focus on monster and vampire literature. My first academic monograph, 'Theological Monsters: Religion and Irish Gothic', is forthcoming with University of Wales Press. With chapters on Charles Robert Maturin, JS Le Fanu, and Bram Stoker, it theorises theological monsters in an Irish Gothic context as vehicles for a surprising and paradoxical epistemology of the divine.

My work on monstrosity also probes how bodies and landscapes are rendered monstrous in Gothic discourse. My new project, 'Haematopoetics: Blood and the Gothic Imagination', explores depictions of blood in the Gothic imagination in the period 1818-1901, at the intersection of metaphysical discourse and medical realism. I hold a research interest in the EcoGothic.

I also consider Romani history, and my first trade book, 'The Roma: A Travelling History' will be published by The Bodley Head in the UK, and by Harper Collins in the USA.

Current research interests

Research interests: Gothic literature; literature and theology; Romantic and Victorian literature; vampire literature; intersections between medical realism and the Gothic; Romani history; literary depictions of the Roma; EcoGothic