Claire Potter

Claire Bond Potter is an American historian. She is a professor of history at The New School.

She is co-executive editor of the journal Public Seminar.^[1]

Potter received a BA from Yale University, where she studied English literature and worked for the Yale Daily News,^[2] and a PhD from New York University.^[3]

From 2006 to 2015, Potter wrote a blog called The Tenured Radical,^[4] hosted by The Chronicle of Higher Education from 2011 onward.^[5]

Her 2020 book Political Junkies was described in Publishers Weekly as "an illuminating rundown of historical trends in political journalism, from New Deal–era consensus building to today's super-partisan echo chambers".^[6]

In 2025, Potter vociferously defended^[7] the American Historical Association elected council's veto of its member's resolution opposing scholasticide in Gaza.^[8]

Books

• War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men and the Politics of Mass Culture (Rutgers University Press, 1998)^[9][10]
• 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)^[11]
• with Renee Romano Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Restaged American History (Rutgers University Press: 2018)^[12][13][14]
• Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (2020, Basic Books: ISBN 9781541644991)^[6]