Staff Profile

From 2016-2023 I was the Joseph Cowen Professor of English Literature at Newcastle University. From 1st October 2023 I am the English (2001) Chair at the University of Cambridge. I retain my link to Newcastle University with two ongoing research projects, and many friendships.

As a Fellow of The British Academy, and Chair of the English Association's Higher Education Committee, working alongside the CEO Becky Fisher, and Elizabeth Draper, Chair of the EA's Secondary and Further Education Committee, I continue to build links and advocate for our subject across the sector.

I have two projects based at Newcastle University: The Thomas Nashe Project and the Leverhulme Trust-funded Bee-ing Human Project.

I am a general editor of the Critical Edition of the Works of Thomas Nashe, alongside Joseph Black, Andrew Hadfield and Cathy Shrank, with Kate De Rycker, Kirsty Rolfe and Rachel White, and the lead of the AHRC-funded The Thomas Nashe Project. With Kate De Rycker and Andrew Hadfield, I am co-editing The Oxford Handbook to Thomas Nashe (Oxford University Press). You can find out more about The Thomas Nashe Project here and here. .

I am co-leading a Leverhulme Trust project (2022-25) exploring emotions and bees with software engineers, digital humanists, literary scholars, musicians, musicologists, bio-environmental scientists: Bee-ing Human: an interactive bee book for the 21st century. Our digital book will include a born-digital edition of Charles Butler's The Feminine Monarchie of Bees (1609, 1623, 1633), data from Vivek Nityananda's and Balumurali G.S's science lab, new musical composition, with an account of our collaboration. This research 'hive' is divided between Newcastle and Cambridge Universities.

You can read about our plans in the Leverhulme Trust 2021 Annual Review here.

You can follow the progress of Bee-ing Human on GitHub.

The Bee-ing Human project is supported by Animating Text Newcastle University (ATNU), led by James Cummings with Tiago Sousa Garcia. You can find out more about ATNU here and here. I look forward to building links across to Cambridge Digital Humanities. 

I continue to learn from the work of Humanities Research Institute on advocacy for SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts for People and the Economy/Environment), working with STEM colleagues.

• Articles

  • Richards J, Wistreich R. Introduction Voicing Text 1500-1700. Huntington Library Quarterly 2019, 82(1), 3-16.
  • Richards J. Reading and Hearing The Womans Booke in Early Modern England. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2015, 89(3), 434-462.

• Authored Book

  • Richards J. Voices and Books in the English Renaissance: A New History of Reading. Oxford University Press, 2019.

• Book Chapter

  • Richards J. Voices and bees: the evolution of Charles Butler’s acoustic book. In: Christopher Cannon and Steven Justice, ed. The Sound of Writing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. In Press.