department of History
roinn na staire

simon potter

Simon Potter is originally from London, and completed his MA, M.St. and D.Phil. in Modern History at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.  He lectures on Imperial History at NUI, Galway. Simon was an IRCHSS Government of Ireland Research Fellow in 2004-2005.

Contact Details

• E-mail: simon.potternuigalway.ie
• Office: Room 413, History Department
• Extension: 3625
• Telephone: 353 91 493 625

Teaching

Simon teaches the following courses:

• HI289 The British Empire, 1815-1880
• HI291 The British Empire, 1880-1945
• HI408 The Rise and Fall of the British World, 1870-1970

He offers a third-year seminar course on The End of the British Empire.

Simon also teaches on the inter-disciplinary MA in Culture and Colonialism.

Research Interests

Simon's research focuses on the history of the mass media in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  More broadly, he is interested in the political and cultural connections that once drew these places together and helped forge a shared imperial British identity.

Simon is currently researching connections between public broadcasting authorities in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, c.1922-1970.

Recent Publications

Monograph

News and the British world: the emergence of an imperial press system 1876-1922  (Oxford Historical Monographs, Oxford University Press. 2003)

Edited collections 

Editor, Newspapers and empire in Ireland and Britain (Four Courts Press, 2004) (In addition to my role as editor, I contributed both a full-length introduction and an essay on 'Empire and the English Press, c. 1857-1914' to this volume) 

Editor, Imperial communication: Australia, Britain and the British empire (Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, 2005)

Articles in refereed journals

'Who listened when London called? Reactions to the BBC Empire Service in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, 1932-1939, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 28, 4 (October 2008) 

'Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media in the Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century British Empire' , Journal of British Studies, 46 (July 2007)

'Richard Jebb, John S. Ewart, and the Round Table, 1898-1926' ( English Historical Review, February 2007)

'The BBC, the CBC, and the 1939 Royal Tour of Canada'  ( Cultural and Social History, 2006)

'Empire, culture and identities in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Britain' ( History Compass, 2006)

'Strengthening the bonds of the Commonwealth:the Imperial Relations Trust and Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian broadcasting personnel in Britain, 1946-52' ( Media History, December 2005)

'The imperial significance of the Canadian-American reciprocity proposals of 1911', ( Historical Journal, March 2004)

'Communication and integration:the press and the British world in Britain and the Dominions, c.1876-1922' ( Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, May 2003)

Book chapters

'Australia and the British empire: expectations and realities' in Deborah Gare and David Ritter (eds.), Making Australian history: perspectives on the past since 1788 (Thomson, South Melbourne, 2008) 

'What did you do in the war, Professor? Imperial history and propaganda, 1939-45' in Robert Blyth and Keith Jeffery (eds), The British empire and its contested pasts (Irish Historical Studies XXVI, Irish Academic Press, Dublin and Portland OR, 2009)

'Britishness, the BBC, and the birth of Canadian public broadcasting, 1928-1936,' in Gene Allen and Daniel Robinson (eds.), Communicating in Canada's Past: approaches to the history of print and broadcast media (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2009)

'British overseas expansion, 1815-1880' in S. Ellis (ed.), Empires and states in European perspective (Pisa, 2002)

'''The dark stream of shameless falsehood''? The British press and news gethering strategies during the Boer War' in C. Wilcox (ed.), Recording the South African War (Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London 1999)

'Churchill, Australia and the Edwardian tariff reform debate' in Carl Bridge and Duncan Anderson (eds.) Churchill and Australia (forthcoming)

Other

'Update:The British Empire', The Historian, no.81 (spring 2004)

Review essay, 'Australia's Past, Present and Future', The Round Table (2001)

Contributor of entries to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the Dictionary of Irish Biography and the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, and of book reviews to the English Historical Review, the Journal of Southern African Studies, the British Journal of Canadian Studies, the Journal of British Studies, Media History and the Round Table.

Other Professional Activities

Simon is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society; a member of the Association of Canadian Studies in Ireland; the African Studies Association of Ireland; the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London; and the British Association of Canadian Studies.

Recent funding awards include: an Ireland-Canada University Foundation Scholarship; a Rydon Fellowship at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, London; an IRCHSS Small Project Award; the International Council for Canadian Studies Faculty Research Award for Ireland 2004/05; an IRCHSS Research Fellowship 2004/5; an Australian Bicentennial Fellowship; a Harold White Fellowship at the National Library of Australia, Canberra; and a Royal Irish Academy/British Academy Exchange Fellowship.   

Simon has held symposia on ’The Imperial Press and Ireland’, ’Imperial Communication: Australia and Britain’, and 'Ireland, Australia and the Imperial War Effort, 1914-18'.

Simon has given academic papers, including seminars as well as conference presentations, at: the Institute of Commonwealth Studies; the Institute of Historical Research; the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies; the University of Oxford; the University of Cambridge; the University of Sussex; the University of Melbourne; the Australian National University; the University of Sydney; the University of New England; Victoria University Wellington; the University of Auckland; the University of Calgary; the University of Cape Town; the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; the Mid-Western Conference on British Studies; the North American Conference on British Studies; NUIG; Queen's University Belfast; University College Dublin; the 2003 Lincoln Anglo-Australian Dialogue and the University of Paris III.  He has also given presentations to student audiences at St. Paul's Girls' School, the University of Leeds, Mary Immaculate College Limerick and Trinity College Dublin, and public lectures for the National Library of Ireland Society; the Deutsch-Irische Gesellschaft, Bonn; and the National Library of Australia.

Simon is on the editorial board of two journals, Media History and the Journal of Historical Biography.

Simon is an Honorary Associate of the Centre for Media History, Macquarie University, Sydney.

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