Dr Anna Reading

Visiting Professor

Anna Reading is Professor of Communication at the University of Western Sydney. She has played a leading international role developing the field of media memory studies, particularly in relation to gender and mediated memories of genocide and terrorism.  She is currently writing a book on how mobile and social media technologies are changing memory through ‘the globital memory field’, as well as co-editing a new international collection on media memories of nonviolent struggle. Her work is making a critical contribution to the international debate on ‘a right to memory’ especially in relation to marginalised groups such as the European Roma.

Her first book, Polish Women, Solidarity and Feminism (Macmillan, 1992) challenged the idea that the collapse of communism marked a revolutionary break for women in Eastern Europe.  With Communism, Capitalism and the Mass Media (Sage, 1998), she worked with Colin Sparks to provide empirical evidence from four East European countries to highlight the difficulties and tensions in the media transition from communism to capitalism and democracy. The Media in Britain (Macmillan, 1999) co-edited with Jane Stokes, sought to extend the boundaries of media studies to include alternative media, museums, and theatre. In The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust: Gender, Culture and Memory, original interviews and analyses of autobiographies, films, museums and memorial sites, showed how gender is dynamically significant in the transnational cultural memories of the holocaust.  Save As... Digital Memory (Palgrave, 2009) co-edited with Andrew Hoskins and Joanne Garde-Hansen addresses the ways in which digital media technologies are changing media memory. 

She is a member of the ESRC Review College and reviews for other major funders, journals and publishers. She founded and was the first Director of the Centre for Media and Culture Research at London South Bank University, UK (2009-11). She is Chair of the Board of the journal Media, Culture and Society, and is on the boards of Memory Studies, the Journal of Qualitative Communication Methods, The Journal of Media Studies and the Journal of Media Education Research.   Her academic work is creatively re-articulated through her theatre plays, seven of which have been performed in the UK, US, Ireland, Poland and India.  Cacti Hearts, her latest short play, addresses the question of land, memory and borders. 

Publications in 2011 include:

2011 ‘The London Bombings: Mobile Witnessing, Mortal Bodies and Globital Time’ Memory Studies. July. 4 (3) pp.298-311

2011  ‘Globalisation and Digital Memory: Globital Memory’s Six Dynamics’ On Media Memory. Edited by Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers, Eyal Zandberg. Basingstoke: Palgrave. pp. 241-252

 2011 ‘Globital Witnessing:  Mobile Memories of Atrocity and Terror from London and Iran.’ Constructions of Conflict: Transmitting Memories of the Past in European Historiography, Literature and Culture.  Edited by Katharina Hall and Kathryn Jones. Peter Lang:  Oxford. pp. 73-90

2011 ‘Identity, Memory and Cosmopolitanism: The Otherness of the Past and a Right to Memory’ European Journal of Cultural Studies. 14. 4.

 A video link to ‘The Dynamics of the Globital Memory Field: on the Non-Memory of Osama Bin Laden’, a lecture by Anna Reading at The University of Tromso, Norway, June 2011 is available at:
 http://webtv.uit.no/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=049a8acfeca046d59c1f10caed911a321d