Dr Richards graduated with an MA in Comparative Literature from University College London before completing a D.Phil. at Wadham College, Oxford. He taught in Oxford, then for four years in Paris, at the École normale supérieure de Paris (ENS-PSL) before joining King’s in 2021. In Paris, he was also a member of the Centre International d’Étude de la Philosophie Française Contemporaine (CIEPFC) cluster of the République des Savoirs (ENS/CNRS/Collège de France) [USR 3608].

Dr Richard is a specialist in twentieth-century European and Francophone philosophy and anti-colonial theory. His research has primarily centred on the intersection of critical theory, gender, and decoloniality.

He is writing his second book, Homo Alienatus: Freedom and Psychosis in Lacan and Fanon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, British Academy Monographs, Forthcoming), which investigates the many overlapping connections between the early Lacan and the young revolutionary decolonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon.

Dr Richards serves as the departmental representative on the Early Career Committee in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at King’s and King’s representative on the Université Paris Cité’s CRIPOLIS advisory board, where he works with King’s doctoral cohort to promote their research in France. Dr Richards is an elected member of the Society for French Studies’ executive committee and a trustee of the Society; moreover, he is the Society’s Publicity Officer and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion lead.

Dr Richards is also a member of the French Studies editorial board (January 2024 - ) and a desk editor at the Literary Encyclopaedia.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Psychoanalysis and Race
• Comparative literature at the crossroads of cultural studies and historical epistemology with a feminist philosophy perspective.
• Gender Studies, literature, and Psychoanalysis.
• Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century French, Francophone, and European Philosophy (for example, Jacques Lacan; Jean Paul-Sartre; Frantz Fanon; German Idealism).

Selected publications

Books:

• Homo Alienatus: Freedom and Psychosis in Lacan and Fanon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, British Academy Monographs, Forthcoming).
• Dialectics of Love in Sartre and Lacan (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2023).

Articles:

• “L’Entre d’eux: Serres with Lacan,” Michel Serres’s Parasitism: Ecology, Politics, and the Posthuman, special issue edited by Christina Howells and Sinan Richards, Modern & Contemporary France. Forthcoming.
• “The Jouissance of Race: Solange Faladé’s Anti-Colonial Multiracialism.” Modern & Contemporary France. Forthcoming.
• “Lacan’s Difficult Literary Dandysism,” Difficulty’s Knots, special issue of Paragraph, edited by Richard Mason and Kasia Mika. Forthcoming.
• “De La Psychose: Ι knew there wasn't anything wrong with you” in Understanding Lacan, Understanding Modernism, ed. Thomas Waller, (London: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, Forthcoming).
• “On My Antecedents,”, co- authored with Derek Hook and Stijn Vanheule, Reading Lacan's Écrits, Edited by Derek Hook, Stijn Vanheule, and Calum Neill (London: Routledge, Forthcoming).
• “Fanon and psychopathology,” in Lacan and Fanon: Critical Perspectives, edited by Sinan Richards and Derek Hook and, Series Editor Calum Neill, Derek Hook, (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, Forthcoming).
• “On My Antecedents,”, co- authored with Derek Hook and Stijn Vanheule, Reading Lacan's Écrits, Edited by Derek Hook, Stijn Vanheule, and Calum Neill (London: Routledge, Forthcoming).
• “La Mère Dangereuse: Reimagining Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre with Lacan’s Graphe du Désir,” French Studies, (2021).
• “The Logician of Madness: Fanon’s Lacan,” Paragraph, Journal of Modern Critical Theory(2021).
• “Sartre and Lacan: Reading Qui Perd Gagnealongside Les Non-Dupes Errent,” in Freedom and the Subject of Theory: Essays in Honour of Christina Howells, eds. Oliver Davis and Colin Davis. (Oxford: Legenda) (2019).
• “The Violence of Politeness: Implicit Bienséancein the Sadian Universe,” Early Modern French Studies,39:1, (2017).

Teaching

Dr Richards teaches Lacanian psychoanalysis; French, Francophone, and European philosophy; and comparative cultural studies and literature on various final year undergraduate modules and MA seminars at King’s.