Professor Anna Reading

Professor Anna Reading is Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Institute and innovative REACH space leading socially engaged, interdisciplinary research across 13 research centres and in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities. Anna Reading has played a leading role in developing the field of Media Memory Studies. She is the author and editor of six books, including  Gender and Memory in the Globital Age; The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust: Gender, Memory and Culture and  Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggles. 

Anna Reading has held senior level University roles in the UK and Australia including Head of the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries (King’s College, 2013-16) and Acting Dean for Research at Western Sydney University (2012). Her research, teaching and engagement combines her experience and expertise as a journalist, playwright and academic.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

[For full details, please see Anna Reading's  PURE research profile.]

Anna Reading has research interests, publications and funded projects in gender, memory and activism, the holocaust, migranthood and digital memory; media memories of Eastern Europe and neurodiversity and cultural memory. 

Anna Reading is joint PI with Dr James Bjork (History) and Neil Jakeman (Digital Humanities) on a King’s Together research project on Virtual Reality, Rehumanisation and Memories of Migration with the Museum of Migration, UK,  following on from  Moving Hearts a project on migration and belonging with Arizona State University and UNSW, Australia and the Museum of Migration. 

Anna Reading is an International Partner to an Australian Research Council Discovery Award 2016-20 “Data Centres and the Governance of Labour and Territory”(434 AUD) with the Universities in Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore and Frankfurt. She was a Partner on a Dutch Network Grant Award “Digital Memories of the Shoah”  (2018-19) working with partners across Europe. She lead the multi-associate Knowledge Transfer Partnership with the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council/Technology Strategy Board ‘Developing New Digital Distribution Networks for Film’. AUS £186,000 (2010-12); and held Time and Memory in British Theatre, a Russian Federation, Ministry of Education Award examining new digital media archives of performances at the Royal National Theatre UK for £15,500 (2009).

Anna Reading currently has eight PhD students.  When space is available, she supervises in her key areas of expertise (see above):

Teaching

Anna Reading teaches and supervises MA Dissertations on the programmes, MA Cultural and Creative Industries.  MA Arts and Cultural Management and MA Global Media Industries.

She contributes to core MA modules as well as the optional module Cultural Memory and is the module convener for the optional module Future Memory: Creating Connected Worlds.

She is an External Examiner for the Centre for Women’s Studies at the University of York, UK.  

Expertise and Public Engagement

Anna Reading’s research creatively engages with social issues through the arts. Her plays, Kiss Punch Goodnight, Want, Hard-Core, Grandma's Garden, The Stoning, Falling, RP35, Cacti Hearts and The Unkind have been performed in the UK and internationally. Her plays are discussed in Aleks Siertz, In Yer Face Theatre: British Theatre in the 1990s; Plays by Women, Volume Seven edited by Michelene Wandor and Mary Remnant as well as Christina Wald’s Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama (2007). A Letter to my Daughter is published in Gender and Memory in the Globital Age (2016).Her work is translated into Chinese, Portuguese, Polish and Finnish. Anna Reading’s personal digital archive is: http://annareadingarchive.com. 

She is joint Managing Editor of  Media, Culture and Society, and is on the boards of Memory Studies, the Journal of the Philosophy of Photography and Oxford University's Lady Margaret Hall's IGS Feminist E Press.

 Anna Reading is Honorary Visiting Professor  and a Global Adviser to  Western Sydney University, Australia and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the  University of Glasgow. She has had Visiting Professorships at SELMA, Centre for Memory and Story Telling, University Turku, University of Loughborough, the University of Tromso and UCLA.

Anna Reading is an Advisory Board Member of the International Memory Studies Association, the Centre for Memory and Storytelling, Finland and is a partner for the London Consortium of Mnemonics Network for Memory Studies. 

Anna Reading is a consultant to archives and museums on the Holocaust on questions of gender and memory, and digital memory. She is on the Expert Committee for the Development of Creative Industries in Russia and the New East for the Calvert 22 Foundation. She contributed to gender policy development as a Partner to the Women’s National Commission between 2002-2010. She writes journalism, with interviews for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, The Guardian, Al Jazeera and Associated Press.