Virginia Richter studied English Literature, Comparative Literature and German Literature at the University of Munich. She was a doctoral fellow at the graduate school Literature and Gender (DFG-Graduiertenkolleg Literatur und Geschlechter-differenz), where she completed her dissertation on violence, knowledge and gender in the eighteenth-century novel. Subsequently, she worked as lecturer in Comparative Literature, coordinator of the graduate school Postcolonial Studies, and director of studies of the newly founded BA/MA programme Comparative Literature at the University of Munich. She carried out postdoctoral research on Darwinism, apes and missing links at the British Library, and as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Kent at Canterbury. For her transdisciplinary research she was awarded the Therese von Bayern Preis. After her ‘Habilitation’ (2006) she spent a semester as Visiting Scholar at the University of Leeds; she was also a Visiting Professor in English at the University of Göttingen and in Comparative Literature at the University of Munich. Since September 2007 she holds the Chair of Modern English Literature at the University of Berne.
Virginia Richter’s current research interests include literature and science, especially Darwinism; the limits of knowledge/the other of knowledge; literary representations of animals; ghosts and uncanny creatures.
Selected publications: Literature after Darwin. Human Beasts in Western Fiction 1859-1939. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; Poetische Gerechtigkeit. Ed. with Sebastian Donat, Roger Lüdeke, and Stephan Packard. Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, in press; Theater im Aufbruch. Anfänge des europäischen Dramas in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ed. with Roger Lüdeke. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008; “Anschauung des Unsichtbaren. Rhetoriken des Nicht-Wissens im Umfeld des Darwinismus”. In: Michael Bies, Michael Gamper (eds.), Literatur und Nicht-Wissen. Historische Konstellationen in Literatur und Wissenschaft, 1750-1930, Berlin: Diaphanes, in press; “Industrialism”. In: Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science. London/New York: Routledge, 2011 [Paperback forthcoming], 474-485; “‘I cannot endure to read a line of poetry’. The Text and the Empirical in Literary Studies”. Journal of Literary Theory 3:3 (2009): 375-386; “Charles Darwin in Patagonia: Descriptive Strategies in the Beagle Diary and The Voyage of the Beagle“. In: Frédéric Regard (ed.), British Narratives of Exploration: Case Studies on the Self and Other. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009, 167-178.
Virginia Richter is part of the Winter School 2012 project team.
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