Jason Potel

About
I received a Bachelor of Science in Cinema and Photography and a Bachelor of Arts in English from Ithaca College with an Honors minor. I hold a Master of Arts in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University. I worked for various documentary production companies (Catahoula Entertainment, Corra Films Inc., CABN Collective, etc) in Manhattan before pursuing my PhD in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick, a degree funded by the Chancellor's International Scholarship.
Research Interests
Reality TV, documentary, television history, emerging media, hoaxes, reception studies, film theory, television news, postcolonial cinema, factual entertainment.
Current Research
My thesis examines how hoaxes spread within the medium of television. I implement reception studies, close-textual analysis, oral-histories assembled through original interviews, and additional methodologies to understand the way questions of performance and authenticity shape the relationships around televisual media. To capture a more comprehensive understanding of hoaxes, I frame them as both an intentional form of deceit and a phenomenological occurrence experienced by the victim. Structuring my research around multiple variables including the source of the hoax as well as the genre of programming in which it occurred, I lay out a detailed study of the many ways misinformation can both reinforce and subvert traditional power dynamics between those participating in the production and consumption of unscripted and nonfiction television.
Supervisor: Richard Wallace
Publications
“No Place to Hide: Pare Lorentz and the Film that Never Was.” Studying the Unmade, Unseen, and Unreleased: Histories Theories, Methods, edited by James Fenwick and Kieran Foster, Bristol, Intellect Publishing, 2024. Unmade Film and Television.
“Fielder Atones in The Curse.” In Media Res, MediaCommons, 8 Apr. 2024, https://mediacommons.org/imr/content/fielder-atones-curse.
Conference Papers
2025 – ‘America’s Got Lies: Exploitation and Sob Stories in Televised Talent Show Competitions,’ Words and Music Association, Fraud & Fakes in Words and Music, University of Richmond
2025 – ‘Nanook of the South: Performing Primitivity in Ethnographic Television Documentary,’ British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies, Global Aesthetics, University of Warwick
2022 – ‘No Place to Hide: Pare Lorentz and the Film that Never Was,’ Shadow Screens: Unmade, Unseen, Unreleased Film and Television, University of Sheffield
Teaching
2023-2024 FI111 Film & Television Criticism (Spring Term)
2023-2024 FI355 Film Aesthetics I (Fall Term)
2022-2023 FI354 Film Aesthetics II (Spring Term)
Memberships
BAFTSS: British Association of Film, Television, and Screen Studies
SCMS: Society for Cinema and Media Studies