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 global modernism and Anglophone world literature, with a particular emphasis on intersectional feminism, lgbtq studies, critical legal theory, and human rights law. 

Her first book project is tentatively entitled The Fury Archives: Women’s Rights, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes. Through attention to the day to day life of feminist action, the book assembles a counter-archive of rights, practiced by female incendiaries, sex workers, former-slaves, colonial subjects, self-named terrorists, crossdressers, lesbian criminals, and queer resistance cells. In so doing, The Fury Archives traces the way that the human emerged as a legal category for women amidst a wider, international push for suffrage reform. However, the book also moves outside the courtroom, to more vernacular imaginations of the human and human rights during moments of revolutionary upheaval. Against a wider tendency to view female citizenship in terms of identity and injury, this turn to the daily life of feminist action supplies an alternative conceptual vocabulary for rights claims, reformulating liberty as both a practice and a demand.

Interests

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

Selected Publications

- 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

Graduate: Sex and Citizenship