Faculty Leaders

Judy Richardson

senior lecturer in English and program coordinator for American Studies

After receiving her PhD from Harvard University, Judy began teaching at Stanford in 2001, offering a range of courses on American literature, including classes on women writers, early American literature, autobiographies, and the literature of cities.

The author of Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley (2003) she continues to write and lecture—at Stanford and beyond—on the history and literature of New York, and on issues of place and cultural memory more broadly.  She is currently working on a book about nineteenth-century America’s “plant-mindedness,” its multivalent obsession with vegetable matters.  When she’s not reading or teaching American novels, she can be found happily combing through forgotten popular or folkloric materials in the library archives.