Dr Sinan Richards joined University College Cork in 2024 as a Lecturer in French. Sinan 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.

Prior to his appointment at UCC, Dr Richards completed a DPhil at Wadham College, University of Oxford. He first taught in Oxford, then for four years in Paris, at the École normale supérieure de Paris (ENS-PSL), before joining King’s College London in 2021 as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. In Paris, Sinan was an academic 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]. At King's, he served on the Université Paris Cité’s Centre de recherches interdisciplinaires sur le politique (CRIPOLIS) advisory board.

Dr Richards 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.

Sinan's first book was entitled The Dialectics of Love in Sartre and Lacan (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), and he has published widely in, for example, French Studies (2021), Paragraph (2021; 2024), Early Modern French Studies (2017), Artl@s Bulletin (2019), Modern & Contemporary France Journal (2023; 2024), and The Institute of Art and Ideas Magazine (2024). 

Dr Richards is co-editor, alongside Professor Christina Howells, of: Michel Serres: ecology, parasitism and the (post)human, a Special Issue of the Modern & Contemporary France Journal, published in 2024

Sinan is currently co-editing two volumes, one with Thomas Waller entitled Understanding Lacan, Understanding Modernism (London: Bloomsbury, Forthcoming), and one with Derek Hook, entitled: Fanon and Psychoanalysis: Critical Perspectives (New York: Routledge, Forthcoming).

He is also a member of the French Studies editorial board and an associate at the European Journal of Psychoanalysis

Dr Richards was an elected member of the Society for French Studies’ executive committee and a trustee of the Society for five years. Dr Richards served as the Society’s Publicity Officer and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion lead.

Dr Richards welcomes expressions of interest for PhD research proposals in the following areas: 

• 20th and 21st-century French, European, and Francophone philosophy and psychoanalytic theory (especially Jacques Lacan, Solange Faladé, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Gilles Deleuze, Jean François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Elsa Dorlin), critical theory and, more broadly, literature and cinema, and political theory.
• History of French Psychoanalysis/ Psychiatry (Early Lacan, L'Évolution Psychiatrique journal, Institutional Psychotherapy [Saint-Alban; La Borde], Félix Guattari, Jean Oury, François Tosquelles).
• Psychoanalysis and Race (Solange Faladé, Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon).
• Contemporary receptions in French psychoanalysis.
• Psychoanalysis and the Family. 
• Politics and Psychoanalysis.
• Comparative literature at the crossroads of cultural studies and historical epistemology with a feminist philosophy perspective.
• Gender Studies, literature, and Psychoanalysis (Preciado, Lippi, Mendelsohn, et al). 
  
  

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• The History of Psychoanalysis in France.
• Twentieth Century French Philosophy.
• Law and French Thought.
• Decolonial Psychoanalysis.

Modules taught: 

• FR2801 - History of Ideas in France
  
• FR4801 - Language and Interpretation
• FR2202 - Literary Seminar I 
• FR4201 - Literary Seminar II
• FR2204 - Topics in Literature and Culture
• FR1201 - Introduction to French Studies
• FR4311 - Trauma and Narrative in the Francophone World  
  
• LL6111 - Theorising the Global: Migration Studies, Postcolonialism, and Critical Theory

Dr Sinan Richards is the French department's Law Representative on the BCL, Law and French degree.