Dr Susan Potter
Senior Lecturer, Film Studies
Dr Susan Potter is a queer media historian who researches the relation of film as modern mass medium to the intensification of sexuality since the late nineteenth century. She also writes about the genres, aesthetics and ethics of sexual representation in contemporary film. Her research is particularly engaged by questions of theory, historiography, the archive and research methodologies, including creative practice. Susan has taught the audiovisual essay, and has a background in documentary production in a variety of roles, including editor, archivist, researcher, production manager, producer and director.
- Lesbian, queer and trans film, television, video and other moving image media
- Queer theory
- LGBTQIA+/SB studies
- History of sexuality
- Feminist film theory
- Melodrama
- Silent cinema
- Documentary theory and practice
Susan is interested in supervising queer, lesbian and trans* film, television and media studies projects, especially those engaged with questions of theory, historiography, the archive and methodology (including media production and other artistic and creative practice modalities).
Current research students:
Imogen Gardam, "What Audiences Want: A Comparative Study of Film Distribution and Subscription Video on Demand in Australia"
EO Gill, "A Roughness of the Eye: Compromising ‘Queer’ in Film & Video" (creative practice)
Kelly Panchyshyn, "Friendshipping: Queer Relationally in Young Adult Television"
Lee Steenbergen, "Changing the Nature of Consumption in Documentary: The Foragers" (creative practice)
Research degree completions:
Evelyn Cindy Magara, “Contemporary East African Cinema: Emergent Themes and Aesthetics.” Lead supervisor, University of Sydney, 2020.
Ivan Čerečina, “Historical Assemblages: Montage in the Films of Nicole Vedrès, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 1947-1957.” Lead supervisor, University of Sydney, 2019.
Keva York, “The Silver Screen Behind His Eyes: Crispin Glover and His It Trilogy.” Lead supervisor 12 months. University of Sydney, 2019.
Lewis Fitz-Gerald, Creative Practice PhD “39,000 Doors: Australian Kids in Care.” Co-supervisor, UNE, 2015–13. Completed 2016. Awarded UNE Chancellor’s Doctoral Research Medal.
The Impersonal is Political: Queer Media and the Self Since the 1960s: Investigates audiovisual media’s role in queer identity formation since the 1960s, across film, television and digital platforms. Tracks across diverse genres how media generate attachments to and detachments from queer characters and their worlds in order to make critically legible an understudied—because pervasive and taken-for-granted—phenomenon, the representation and mediation of personhood. Critically interrogates and contributes to queer theory’s development by integrating an attention to mediation as pervasive social apparatus of the self into its explanations and critiques of identity and normativity, and political questions of subjecthood including agency and relationality.
The Distribution of Love: Melodrama, Cinema, Intimacy: Investigates early cinema’s role, and in particular that of film melodrama, in modernizing, democratizing and dispersing novel forms of intimacy and family life. By focusing on the first few decades of the twentieth-century, the project considers a period in which cinema was arguably the most important mass medium through which the experience of modern life was mediated, including new social articulations of the self, the couple and the family. Taking up the theorization of melodrama as mode, one that organises ideas and feelings in order to make sense of disruptive transformations in everyday life, the project tracks the circulations and receptions of film melodrama between Europe and the US, and the Australia-Pacific region.
Positions
- Secretary, Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (2019-2022)
- Past President, Women and Film History International (2019-2021)
Memberships
- Women and Film History International
- Society for Cinema and Media Studies
- Australian Earth Laws Alliance
- 2020: John Leo and Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-authored or Edited Book in LGBTG Studies, Popular Culture Association (PCA)
- 2018: Australian Academy of the Humanities Publication Subsidy for Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming June 2019)
- 2015: Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (SSAAANZ) Best Paper Prize for "Valentino's Lesbianism: Stardom, Spectatorship, and Sexuality in 1920s Hollywood Cinema” published in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media.
- 2013: Dame Joan Metge Post-Doctoral Research Award, Kate Edger Educational Charitable Trust
- 2013: Vice Chancellor’s Prize for Best Doctoral Thesis, University of Auckland
- 2009: DocNZ Best New Zealand Short Documentary Award for An Ordinary Person.
| Project title | Research student |
|---|---|
| What Audiences Want: A Comparative Study of Film Distribution and Subscription Video on Demand in Australia | Imogen GARDAM |
| Changing the Nature of Consumption in Documentary: The Foragers | Lee STEENBERGEN |
Selected publications
(University of Illinois Press, 2019)
(2008)
