Photometric follow-up of eclipsing post-common-envelope binaries

Following the rapidly increasing interest in a wide variety of astronomical transients, the desire for large-area time-domain photometric surveys has exploded. From dedicated supernova searches to multi-messenger gravitational wave follow-up facilities to transient surveys simply designed to detect whatever they can find, the total area of the sky covered by these as well as the temporal sampling is only increasing. One of the outcomes of this is that periodically varying sources are becoming easy to find and this includes eclipsing systems -- particularly those with orbital periods of order a few days or less such as the post-common-envelope white dwarf-M~dwarf binaries. As such, the numbers of these eclipsing post-common-envelope binaries are increasing dramatically. Although this rapidly increasing population encompasses a wealth of information and potential insight into white dwarf and close binary astrophysics, the sheer numbers being discovered make the detailed follow-up that is required to capitalise on this sample difficult and time consuming. In this thesis I present a new technique of characterising these eclipsing white dwarf binaries from their eclipse light curves and demonstrate it to be significantly more robust and precise than previous methods while requiring less telescope time overall. I then go on to use this new technique to measure the parameters for 33 new eclipsing systems, finding a variety of interesting examples including some with pulsating WDs, magnetic WDs, or brown dwarf companions. Finally, I summarise some of the future research that naturally follows on from the work presented here.