Professor Jennifer Richards, FBA, FEA, is the English (2001) Chair in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. Prior to joining Cambridge, she held the Joseph Cowen Chair in English at the University of Newcastle, where she remains a visiting professor. She holds degrees from Queen Mary College, University of London, and the University of Edinburgh. Her research expertise includes early modern literature, the histories of reading and of rhetoric, and scholarly editing. Linking her research is an interest in the human voice, the topic of her monograph, Voices and Books in the English Renaissance: A New History of Reading (Oxford, 2019).

Her current work is collaborative and often multidisciplinary. Forthcoming work includes The Cambridge History of Rhetoric: The Renaissance, coedited with Virginia Cox, which offers an inclusive and global perspective on education in and the uses of the arts of persuasion. She is also the lead of the Bee-ing Human Project, a STEM-SHAPE collaboration exploring past and present approaches to the study of the sentience of bees. You can view the digital bee book the project team is co-creating here. 

Professor Richards is also one of the four general editors of the Works of Thomas Nashe, forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Finally, as chair of The English Association (2024-7), she is committed to advocacy for English Studies and the humanities.