Jill Richards

Jill Richards is Assistant Professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Program and the Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights. Her research focuses on transnational modernism and postcolonial literature, with a particular emphasis on intersectional feminism, queer theory, critical legal theory, and human rights law. 

She is the author of The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes (Columbia UP, July 2020),  which focuses on the day to day life of feminist action to assemble a counter-archive for human rights, practiced by female incendiaries, former-slaves, colonial subjects, self-named terrorists, lesbian criminals, and queer resistance cells. She is a co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (Columbia UP, 2020) , alongside Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, and Katherine Hill. 

Her current book project, This Body Called Empire, frames the colonial archive as a resource for transnational queer theory and offers a literary history of biometric technologies. This work brings together social reproduction theory, studies of global migration, and queer feminist science studies through a focus on the trans-oceanic routes of female labor migration through port cities in the Caribbean, England, South Africa, India, and Australia. Richards also writes public-facing criticism for a variety of publications on topics relating to gender, sexuality, housework, fan cultures, popular television, cinema, and young adult fiction.

Interests

global modernism, gender and sexuality, citizenship, human rights, critical legal theory, revolution, social movements, cinema, avant-gardes, young adult literature

Selected Publications

- Claude Cahun’s Pronouns in Modernism/modernity Print Plus, April 29, 2021

- Book Forum on The Fury Archives, with response essays by Inderpal Grewal, Scott Herring, Janice Ho, and Gabriel Hankins, Critical Analysis of Law: An International & Interdisciplinary Law Review, vol. 7, no. 2 (2020)

- The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes (Columbia UP, July 2020)

- The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (Columbia UP, 2020)

- The Long Middle: Reading Women’s Riots ELH (2018) 

- Pussy Wars, Los Angeles Review of Books (2017)

- The Slow Burn: A Summer of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, Post45​: Contemporaries (2015)

- Women, Weepies, and The Fault in Our Stars, Post 45: Contemporaries (2014)

- Model Citizens and Millenarian Subjects: Vorticism, Suffrage, and the Great Unrest, Journal of Modern Literature 37:3 (2014)  

- Berlin Alexanderplatz’s Serial Women, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 28:3 (2013)

Courses

Undergraduate: Modern British Novel; The Human and Human Rights; Young Adult Dystopian Novel; Feminist and Queer Theory; Major English Poets; World Literature in English; Queer Modernism

Graduate: Sex and Citizenship; Sexuality and Disability