Anna Reading is a British author and academic, specialising in gender, migrant-hood, activism, The Holocaust, Eastern Europe and digital memory.
[3][5] Reading completed her PhD thesis, Socially inherited memory, gender and the public sphere in Poland, at the University of Westminster School of Media, Arts and Design in 1996.
[1] Reading teaches and supervises BA, MA and PhD students in cultural memory, creative industries, and media studies programs.
[10] Reading's play demonstrates how power is incest's root cause through the development of Dawn, one of the scandal's victims and survivors from her traumatic childhood into adulthood.
One example given is a scene where a Policeman visits Dawn's classroom to give a lecture on stranger danger and espouses that the family unit is unequivocally safe.
[4] Reading's Hard Core, written for Cardiff's WOT Theatre,[5] gave a feminist perspective on sexual decadence in a rigid class-based society.
Reading set the story at the start of the fall of the Roman Empire and claimed that an interview with Poland's first sex shop inspired the play.
Here, Reading observed a resurgence in antisemitism which Poland's future populist Prime Minister and leader of Lech Wałęsa appeared to exploit to court the right-wing vote.
"[5] While conducting interviews for the book, Reading also observed that the country's nascent free press had led to a proliferation of pornography in post-communist Poland.
In this part, she discusses how Polish literature and arts paint a picture of women's lives defined by male-run organisations and family employment.
And therefore, it presents a reality where women struggle but engage with the restrictions on their lives—therefore redefining themselves as individuals actively changing their lives in ways relevant to them.
[14] Reading's 2002 book challenged Geoffrey Hartman's assumption that Holocaust survival is gender-neutral, arguing that the atrocity and its memories are gendered.
[16] In the book's closing chapter, Reading examines autobiographies to bring to light histories marginal to the Holocaust's accepted histographical account.
The book highlights the transition from traditional, bulky, and inaccessible records to more affordable and easily retrievable digital data storage made possible by mobile networks and increased global accessibility.
Throughout the chapters, Reading examines the role of memory in different contexts, from literature to prenatal narratives, wearable technologies, and citizen journalism.
Reading's work asks readers to critically examine the relationship between technology, memory, and gender while acknowledging the complexities and intricacies of networked power.