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Biography

Dr Richards is a graduate of University College London and Wadham College, Oxford, where he completed his DPhil in twentieth-century French Philosophy.

He previously taught in Oxford, then for four years in Paris, at the École normale supérieure de Paris (ENS-PSL) before joining King’s as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow.

In Paris, he was also a member of the Centre International d’Étude de la Philosophie Française Contemporaine (CIEPFC) cluster of the République des Savoirs (ENS/CNRS/Collège de France) [USR 3608].

He is currently writing a book called Science’s Fiction, about Lacanian philosophy of science.

Dr Richards also serves as the Publicity Officer for the Society for French Studies.

Research interests and PhD supervision

  • Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century French, Francophone, and European Philosophy (for example: Lacan; Sartre; Fanon; German Idealism).
  • Psychoanalysis and the history of the unconscious.
  • Contemporary philosophy and comparative literature, at the crossroads of cultural studies and historical epistemology with a feminist philosophy perspective.

Selected publications

  • “The Logician of Madness: Fanon’s Lacan,” Paragraph, Journal of Modern Critical Theory(2021).
  • “La Mère Dangereuse: Reimagining Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre with Lacan’s Graphe du Désir,” French Studies, (2021).
  • “Infidelity as Reality: Re-Staging the Global South with Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up,” in ARTL@S Bulletin 8:2 (2019).
  • “Sartre and Lacan: Reading Qui Perd Gagnealongside Les Non-Dupes Errent,” in Freedom and the Subject of Theory: Essays in Honour of Christina Howells, eds. Oliver Davis and Colin Davis. (Oxford: Legenda) (2019).
  • “‘Rühre nicht, Bock! denn es brennt:’ Schelling, Žižek and Christianity,” in Slavoj Žižek and Christianity, eds, Sotiris Mitralexis and Dionysios Skliris (2018).
  • “The Violence of Politeness: Implicit Bienséancein the Sadian Universe,” Early Modern French Studies,39:1, (2017).

Teaching

Dr Richards is not scheduled to teach in 2021-2022.