Professor Anna Reading is an author, academic and playwright with expertise in intersectional and transnational feminist approaches to media and memory studies. As well as plays and fiction, she is the author of four academic books, including Autistic Dreaming: Vibrant Memory, Activism and Environment (2025) and co-edited four collections, including The Right to Memory: History, Media, Law and Practice (2024). Her literary profile is with Watson Little.

She has a First Class BA in English Literature and Politics, 1987, an MA (with Distinction) in Women’s Studies, 1988, both from the University of York, UK, with a PhD in Communication Studies, University of Westminster, 1996. She co-founded York Rape Crisis and Strip Search Theatre, lectured in English Literature at Lodz University, Poland (1988-1989); and worked as a playwright and journalist. She was Reader in Media Studies at London South Bank University; moved to Australia to take up a Professorship in Communication Studies, University of Western Sydney in 2011, joining King’s College, London as Professor of Culture and Creative Industries in 2013.

Anna Reading has held senior academic appointments in the UK and Australia including: Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Institute and REACH space, King’s College, 2018-22 ; Head of Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries 2013-17; Acting Dean for Research in Arts and Humanities at the University of Western Sydney 2012; Director, Centre for Media and Cultural Research, London South Bank University 2008-10.

Research interests and PhD supervision

Anna Reading’s research in media, memory studies and memory activism is from a gendered and feminist perspective. She has research interests in cultural memories of neurodiversity and autism, colonialism and migration, Eastern Europe, Romani and the Holocaust as well as peace activism. She explores memory rights, materialities, media technologies and economies of cultural, public and more-than-human memories in transnational contexts. She combines approaches that are creative and practice-led, qualitative and socially engaged. Key areas include:

• Gender, feminism and memory
• Cultural and media memory
• Activist memory
• Creative memory
• Neuroqueering media and memory

Anna Reading is pleased to supervise PhDs in these areas subject to capacity. She holds a supervisory excellence award.

Teaching

Anna Reading teaches at undergraduate and post-graduate levels on King’s media and cultural studies programmes. She teaches media and cultural theory, research methods, culture and activism as well as specialist teaching in mediated and public memory and imaginaries. She supervises BA and MA student dissertations and creative projects.

Expertise and public engagement

Anna Reading is an expert assessor for UNESCO. Her research contributes to NHS approaches to neurodiversity and mental health. She is part of the Transforming Diversity Initiative for the International Memory Studies Association.

Her plays, Kiss Punch Goodnight, Want, Hard-Core, Grandma's Garden, The Stoning, Falling, RP35, Cacti Hearts, Letter to My daughter, and The Unkind have been performed in theatres in the UK and internationally. Her plays are listed on The UK Playwrights Database, Doollee, and discussed in Aleks Siertz, In Yer Face Theatre: British Theatre in the 1990s; Michelene Wandor and Mary Remnant’s (eds.) Plays by Women, Vol. 7; and Christina Wald’s Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama. The script for A Letter to my Daughter is published in Gender and Memory in Globital Age (2016). Her work is translated into Chinese, Portuguese, Polish and Finnish. Anna Reading’s personal archive is http://annareadingarchive.com

Anna is Joint Managing Editor of the academic journal, Media, Culture and Society. She is on the boards of Memory Studies, Memory Studies Review; Memory, Mind and Media; the Journal of the Philosophy of Photography and Oxford University's Lady Margaret Hall's IGS Feminist E Press.

Anna Reading is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Cultural Policy Research, University of Glasgow. She was Honorary Visiting Professor and a Global Adviser to the Institute of Culture and Society University of Western Sydney, Australia (2013-2025). She had Visiting Professorships at SELMA, Centre for Memory and Story Telling, University Turku, Loughborough University, the University of Tromso, University of Leipsig, and UCLA. She has been an external examiner in media studies at Bournemouth University, University of Greenwich and women’s studies at the University of York.

Anna 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 public museums and memorial sites on questions of gender and memory, and digital memory. She contributed to gender policy development as a Partner to the Women’s National Commission 2002-2010. She wrote and presented ‘Introducing Media’ a 12-part BBC World Service radio programme broadcast to countries in Asia and Africa. She writes journalism, with interviews for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, The Guardian, Al Jazeera and Associated Press.

Funded projects include: 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 with Arizona State University and UNSW, Australia; International Partner to an ARC Discovery Award 2016-20 “Data Centres and the Governance of Labour and Territory” with the Universities in Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore and Frankfurt. Partner to a Dutch Network Grant Award “Digital Memory of the Shoah” 2018-20 and led a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with the UK AHRC ‘Developing New Digital Distribution Networks for Film’. 2010-12.

Selected publications

Anna Reading’s books include Polish Women, Solidarity and Feminism (Palgrave Macmillan, 1992); with Colin Sparks Communism, Capitalism and the Mass Media (Sage, 1988); The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust: Gender, Memory and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Gender and Memory in the Globital Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Autistic Dreaming: Vibrant Memory, Activism and Environment (Berghahn 2025).

She co-edited The Media in Britain (1999) Macmillan; Save As... Digital Memories (Palgrave, 2009); Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggles: Powerful Times (Palgrave, 2016) and A Right to Memory: History, Media, Law and Ethics (Berghahn Books, 2023).