Russell Potter
Russell Potter, Historian
Russell A. Potter writes on the nineteenth-century’s fascination with arctic exploration, particularly with reference to the lost arctic expedition of Sir John Franklin, which captivated artists and writers the world around, among them Frederic Edwin Church, William Bradford, Sir Edwin Landseer, Henry David Thoreau, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Charles Dickens. His book, arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818-1880 will be published in July of 2007 by the University of Washington Press. He also was featured in a recent documentary about Franklin, Arctic Passage: Prisoners of the Ice, which aired in February 2006 as an episode of PBS’s acclaimed NOVA series. A somewhat different version of the same film aired in 2005 as “The search for the Northwest Passage” on the UK’s Channel Four. He maintains a web museum devoted to Franklin materials, and edits the online Arctic Book Review. He lives and teaches in Providence, Rhode Island.
