Juno Jill Richards

Juno Richards is Associate Professor of English and Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Their research focuses on queer/trans studies and the history of sexuality in the long twentieth century. Current writing and teaching projects take up transgender archives, queer feminist science, critical disability studies, and transnational social reproduction.

Richards is currently working on two book projects. The XYZ Murders: Life and Death in the Transgender Archives follows a case of serial murders in the 1920s mentioned in the sexological texts of Jennie June. A meditation on violence in the early trans archive, the chapters alternate between an investigation of the crimes and a more expansive accounting of gender variant life worlds before Stonewall. A second book project, This Reckoning: Queer and Trans Durations, turns to the ways that queer/trans artists have interpreted their own genealogies in the wake of Atlantic empire.

JunoRichards.com

Interests

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

Selected Publications

- “Oceans, Archives, Perverts: Sex Work in the Colonial Port City” GLQ 28.4 (2022) 

- 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

updated: January 2025