ProfessorEmily Potter

Emily is Professor of Literary Studies, and Head of Academic Group, Writing, Literature and Culture, School of Communication and Creative Arts. Her research focuses on the intersections of cultural production, storytelling and settler colonial environments. Her areas of expertise include literature and climate change, literature and place-making, legacies of mining and extraction, regional creative arts and communities, urban design and poetic practice, the biopolitics of water and consumption, contemporary Australian literature, and postcolonial texts and environments.

Emily is the author of Writing Belonging at the Millennium: Notes from the Field of Settler Colonial Place (Uni Chicago) and co-author of Plastic Water: The Social and Political Life of Bottled Water (with Gay Hawkins and Kane Race, MIT Press). She has been a chief investigator on four previous ARC projects, and is lead investigator of ARC Discovery Project 'Everyday, Humble, Messy: Understanding place-based repair in climate-affected communities', (with CIs Fiona Miller, Donna Houston, Brigid Magner, PIs Clifton Evers and Eva Lövbrand) (2025-2027). She is co-convenor (with Fiona Miller and Eva Lövbrand) of the international "Shadow Places Network: A collaboration to re-imagine and co-produce connections for justice in an era of climate change", funded by the Mistra Formas Seed Box Environmental Humanities Collaboratory, Sweden. Emily is Treasurer of ASAL (Association for the Study of Australian Literature).

Unit chair ALL381 Nature, Climate, Transformation

PhD supervisor in the areas of Australian literature, environmental and extractivist literatures, environmental humanities, place-making, regional literary history, and reading cultures.