Anna Reading

Reading is a Culture and Creative Industries professor and was director of the Arts and Humanities Research Institute at King's College London from 2018 to 2022.[1]

Reading teaches and supervises BA, MA and PhD students in cultural memory, creative industries, and media studies programs. She is also an External examiner at the University of York.

She is a member of the advisory board for the International Memory Studies Association and consults with archives and museums on The Holocaust, focusing on gender, memory, and digital memory.[1] One of Reading's research areas is social and cultural memory studies. Her work explores what she refers to as the "globital memory field" using digital analysis techniques.[7]

Reading founded the Centre for Media and Culture Research at London South Bank University and served as its first director. Later she headed the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King's College London.[1][7]

Reading's company Strip Search Theatre was an all-female group that used Physical theatre, mime, clowning and music to challenge society's taboos. [GreenfieldFPA]. Her plays are part of the British drama movement called ‘In yer face theatre’.[8]

In 1987, the all-female Strip Search theatre company performed Reading's Kiss Punch Goodnight. Reading wrote the play during her English literature degree. She based it on the Cleveland child-sex abuse scandal.[4] The play debuted in York before appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.[9]

The play explores father-daughter-rape and explores shame, pain and confusion through a variety of dramatic modes.[10] Reading's play demonstrates how power is incest's root cause through the development of Dawn, one of the scandal's victims and survivors from her traumatic childhood into adulthood.[4] It exposes education, literature, the media, religion and science's obfuscation of incest. One example given is a scene where a Policeman visits Dawn's classroom to give a lecture on stranger danger and espouses that the family unit is unequivocally safe. Later in the play, Dawn pleads with her mother not to leave her at home with her father for the evening.[4] The play opens with Eartha Kit's My Heart Belongs to Daddy, followed by a sexual assault on a four-year-old. Speaking to The Yorkshire Post, Reading stated that "some of the scenes are so explicit that a man just couldn't do them, it would be too horrible".[4] Dawn encounters isolation after failing to confide in a classmate. Finally, she reveals her hate, shame and guilt surrounding her abusive father after her first sexual experience with another man. She conveys her childhood ordeal as a fairytale featuring a queen, a princess and a king who abuses his power.[4]

Reading's Hard Core, written for Cardiff's WOT Theatre,[5] gave a feminist perspective on sexual decadence in a rigid class-based society. Reading set the story at the start of the fall of the Roman Empire and claimed that an interview with Poland's first sex shop inspired the play. The production aired in Cardiff's Sherman Theatre[5] and London. The theatres billed the performance as an adult show because the performance blended comedy with eroticism and featured a lot of bare flesh and simulated sexual acts.[11] The play contained nudity, simulated brothel sex, and examined gay and straight relationships. The play's subject was sexual decadence, change and social class.[11]

Reading devised the idea for the play while researching her book Polish Women, Solidarity and Feminism in Poland. Here, Reading observed a resurgence in antisemitism which Poland's future populist Prime Minister and leader of Lech Wałęsa appeared to exploit to court the right-wing vote. Speaking to the Western Mail, Reading stated, "What is happening is frightening. If Wałęsa gets in we'll see an elected dictator in Eastern Europe. What was a totalitarian communist regime will simply turn into a totalitarian Catholic regime."[5] While conducting interviews for the book, Reading also observed that the country's nascent free press had led to a proliferation of pornography in post-communist Poland. At one point, she visited a shop selling sex toys and guns. Reading claims, she asked the shop's manager why they sold sex toys and firearms together. The manager replied, "They go together – you always see sex and violence in American films". Power and sexuality became Hard Core's central themes.[5]

In 1992, Macmillan published Reading's Polish Women Solidarity and Feminism.[12] The book looked at how change affects women's lives in times of major upheaval around Europe.[13] Furthermore, the book sought to understand its subject's cultural reality from a Western-feminist viewpoint.[14] Reading split the book into two parts. Part one observes the Polish female experience from an outsider's perspective. In this part, she discusses how Polish literature and arts paint a picture of women's lives defined by male-run organisations and family employment. While part two questions whether the lifestyles conveyed in part one are the only way to view Reading's subjects' lives. And therefore, it presents a reality where women struggle but engage with the restrictions on their lives—therefore redefining themselves as individuals actively changing their lives in ways relevant to them. One of the book's recurring themes was the Polish words 'grancia' and 'kresy', the former meaning 'fixed and static border' and the latter meaning permeable changing border.[13] Structurally, Reading's viewpoint transitions from an outsider's perspective, i.e. someone behind a static border, to an insider's perspective. The book's final section covers the various Polish-feminist groups that emerged from Polish society during this period.[14]

Reading's 2002 book challenged Geoffrey Hartman's assumption that Holocaust survival is gender-neutral, arguing that the atrocity and its memories are gendered.[15]

The book's first chapter analyses holocaust memory scholarship's dearth of literature discussing gender. And outlines Reading's claim that "mechanisms of gender and sexuality interconnect in multivalent ways in terms of the constellation of memory, memory practices and meditations in different cultural and national contexts".[16]

In chapter two, Reading backs up her claims from chapter one by searching for the causes of these historiographical silences and their function. Moreover, she clarifies how a gendered vantage point yields a more nuanced and deeper understanding of the Holocaust.[16]

In the book's closing chapter, Reading examines autobiographies to bring to light histories marginal to the Holocaust's accepted histographical account. Furthermore, she explores how the Holocaust reversed traditional gender boundaries.[17][16] Essentially, Reading highlights how gender-based selection and the subjective experiences arising from those decisions are transferred into memories of the atrocity. Moreover, as a remedy, Reading argues that contemporary Holocaust representations should portray the experiential dichotomy arising from gender.[15] However, Reading clarifies that while gender shouldn't be omitted from historiographical Holocaust accounts, historians shouldn't see gender as a means of relativising the Nazi's anti-Semitic agenda. Finally, by highlighting gender, specifically its role in memory articulation, Reading posits a deeper understanding of the events, conditions and the state's role in the genocide.[16]

Save As...Digital Memories explores the concept of digital memory and the impact of digital technologies on how we remember and store information. The book highlights the transition from traditional, bulky, and inaccessible records to more affordable and easily retrievable digital data storage made possible by mobile networks and increased global accessibility. The text features contributions from scholars and covers various topics related to digital memory, including online memorials, blogging, mobile phones, social networking sites, and Digital Archives. Subjects such as the 'war on terror', cyberpunk, The Holocaust, digital remixing, and virtual museums are also examined. The collection's essays offer an accessible and insightful introduction to digital memory, demonstrating how digital technologies alter memory discourses, practices, forms and how humans conceptualise memory.[18]

In her book, Gender and Memory in the Globital Age, Reading explores gender and memory in the "globital age," a term she coined to describe the current era of globalisation and digitisation. The book is structured into seven chapters, in which Reading discusses the history of communication, the role of memory, and the importance of considering gender in memory studies. She compares her work to previous scholars, emphasising the need to view technology more complexly.

Throughout the chapters, Reading examines the role of memory in different contexts, from literature to prenatal narratives, wearable technologies, and citizen journalism. She highlights the importance of considering women's experiences and memories in shaping global power networks. Reading's work asks readers to critically examine the relationship between technology, memory, and gender while acknowledging the complexities and intricacies of networked power.[19]