Dr. Anna Richards

Overview

Biography

Anna joined Birkbeck in 2003. She has been part-time (0.5) since 2010. From 1998-2003, she was Lecturer in German at Oxford Brookes University. 

She studied French and German at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and at Balliol College, Oxford. During her studies she spent a year at the University of Tübingen as an Erasmus scholar and a year at the University of Hamburg as a Hanseatic Scholar. She was also a Research Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation in Berlin in the year 2004-5.

Highlights

• Anna Richards is interested in the intersections between feminism, critical animal studies, and fiction. She is currently writing a book on non-human animals and women in the work of German women novelists from the nineteenth century to the present day. Her recent article 'Sentiment and spectres: The posthumous influence of animals and women in Marie Espérance von Schwartz’s Gemma, oder Tugend und Laster (1877) and the late nineteenth-century anti-vivisection debate' (The German Quarterly, 97:3, 2024) discusses how non-human animals haunt anti-vivisection writing. 'The Friendship of Our Distant Relations": Feminism and Animal Families in Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand (1963)' (Feminist German Studies 36.2, 2020) analyses the protagonist's interactions with non-human animals as demonstrating a feminist ethics of care. '"Ob Mädchen oder Hunde": Women and Animals in Karen Duve's Regenroman' (German Life and Letters, 71:4, 2018) shows how, in Duve's novel, women and animals are both victimised under a patriarchy which constructs masculinity against a female or animal ‘other’.

  
  

• Anna has written and edited a number of books and articles on German women writers from the late eighteenth century onwards, focusing in particular on the representation of women's illness and death. Her work on this subject has been interdisciplinary, reading works of fiction alongside medical history. 

• She has also published on grief, mourning and Empfindsamkeit in the eighteenth century. 

ORCID

0000-0002-0123-0823

Research

Research interests

• German women's writing
• Feminism and critical animal studies
• Empfindsamkeit and the German novel
• Grief and mourning in the German novel
• The representation of women's illness and death

Supervision and teaching

Teaching

Teaching modules

• Berlin since 1945: History and Culture (Level 5)
• Studying Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies in Modern Languages
• Culture and Text: 'Imagined Communities'
• Culture and Image
• Climate Change Communication: Feeling, Thinking, Acting
• Cities and Cultures: Urban Experience in Comparative Perspective (Level 5)
• Transformation, Transgression and Tradition: German and Italian Culture across the Centuries (Level 6)
• The Arts: Questioning the Contemporary World
• Interrogating the Self

Publications