Donna Potts

Professor / Graduate Faculty
Ph.D. 1992, University of Missouri, Columbia

Fields of interest:
Modern and Contemporary Irish and American Literature; Native American Literature; World Literature; Poetry; Linguistics/English Language; Literature and the Environment; Cultural Studies; Trauma Theory/Trauma Narratives.

As of 2013, Donna Potts moved to the Department of English at Washington State University.

Donna L. Potts has published articles on writers such as Katharine Tynan, Margaret Atwood, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Patrick McCabe, J.M. Coetzee, Frank McCourt, Moya Cannon, and many others. Her books included Howard Nemerov and Objective Idealism: The Influence of Owen Barfield (1994) and Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition (2011). Her book of poetry, Waking Dreams, was published by Salmon in 2012. In 1997 she won a Fulbright Senior Lecturing Award to the National University of Ireland in Galway, and she returned there for her 2004-2005 and 2011-12 sabbaticals. In the fall of 2011, she was the recipient of a Fellowship in Irish Studies, awarded by the Irish American Cultural Institute and the Centre for Irish Studies. Her fellowship led to a research project on the Donegal poet, Francis Harvey, on whom an edited collection, This Landscape's Fierce Embrace: The Poetry of Francis Harvey is forthcoming at Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Her teaching interests include Irish literature and film, World Literature (especially African and Indian literatures), the Literature of Work, Old English, History of the English Language, and poetry. Her works in progress include a book on Irish Literature and Environmentalism, a book of creative nonfiction about prostitution in 1930's Fort Worth, and a memoir, Big Girl Now. She serves as the Chair of the Assembly of State Conferences for the AAUP (2009-2012), and writes and lectures on sexual violence.