Anna Reading is Professor of Culture and Creative Industries, and Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Institute (AHRI), King’s College London.
Anna is Director of the AHRI and innovative REACH space, leading socially engaged, interdisciplinary research across 13 research centres and in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities. Anna Reading has played a leading role in developing the field of Media Memory Studies. She is the author and editor of six books, including Gender and Memory in the Globital Age; The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust: Gender, Memory and Culture and Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggles.
Anna Reading has held senior level University roles in the UK and Australia including Head of the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries (King’s College, 2013-16) and Acting Dean for Research at Western Sydney University (2012). Her research, teaching and engagement combines her experience and expertise as a journalist, playwright and academic.
Anna Reading has research interests, publications and funded projects in gender, memory and activism, the holocaust, migranthood and digital memory; media memories of Eastern Europe and neurodiversity and cultural memory.
Anna Reading is joint PI with Dr James Bjork (History) and Neil Jakeman (Digital Humanities) on a King’s Together research project on Virtual Reality, Rehumanisation and Memories of Migration with the Museum of Migration, UK, following on from Moving Hearts a project on migration and belonging with Arizona State University and UNSW, Australia and the Museum of Migration.
Anna Reading is an International Partner to an Australian Research Council Discovery Award 2016-20 “Data Centres and the Governance of Labour and Territory”(434 AUD) with the Universities in Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore and Frankfurt. She was a Partner on a Dutch Network Grant Award “Digital Memories of the Shoah” (2018-19) working with partners across Europe. She lead the multi-associate Knowledge Transfer Partnership with the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council/Technology Strategy Board ‘Developing New Digital Distribution Networks for Film’. AUS £186,000 (2010-12); and held Time and Memory in British Theatre, a Russian Federation, Ministry of Education Award examining new digital media archives of performances at the Royal National Theatre UK for £15,500 (2009).
Theatre and Performance Publications
Books
Gender and Memory in the Globital Age. / Reading, Anna Marie.Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 235 p.
Articles and Book Chapters
Transformative Tales: Theatre Storytelling, Ethics and Restitution. / Reading, Anna Marie.Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative. ed. / Hanna Meretoja; Colin Davis. Abingdon and New York : Routlege, 2018.
Performance and Artistic Collaborations
Anna Reading’s research creatively engages with social issues through the arts. Her plays, Kiss Punch Goodnight, Want, Hard-Core, Grandma’s Garden, The Stoning, Falling, RP35, Cacti Hearts and The Unkind have been performed in the UK and internationally. Her plays are discussed in Aleks Siertz, In Yer Face Theatre: British Theatre in the 1990s; Plays by Women, Volume Seven edited by Michelene Wandor and Mary Remnant as well as Christina Wald’s Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama (2007). A Letter to my Daughter is published in Gender and Memory in the Globital Age (2016).Her work is translated into Chinese, Portuguese, Polish and Finnish. Anna Reading’s personal digital archive is: http://annareadingarchive.com.