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Graduate Tutor Email: a.ossa-richardson@ucl.ac.uk |  |
Education and Experience
Anthony Ossa-Richardson studied philosophy at Bristol (BA), Renaissance literature at York (MA), and intellectual history at the Warburg Institute (Ph.D., 2011). He worked for a year as a research assistant on the manuscript notebooks of Sir Thomas Browne, then held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London. In 2015 he joined the English department at the University of Southampton, before coming to UCL in 2019. He became Associate Professor in 2024.
Research Interests
Anthony is primarily interested in the ways in which writers convey meaning in literature, and the ways in which readers find it—or make it. He has written about authors of many periods: the Elizabethan satirist Thomas Nashe and his contemporary Sir John Davies, John Taylor the ‘Water Poet’, Thomas Browne, Alexander Pope, George Eliot, Marcel Proust and William Empson. But he has also published on weird miscellaneous topics: pagan religion, Renaissance humanism, the Tunsian sultan Muley al-Hasan, biblical translation, the science of sneezing, the crystallised tears of Christ, eighteenth-century metafiction, Victorian demonology, the origin of dramatic irony, unconscious hypocrisy, universal language schemes, the limits of allegory, and the colonial study of African geography.
His most recent published book is a translation (co-authored with Dr Richard Oosterhoff at the University of Edinburgh) of the earliest book about Africa printed in Europe, The Cosmography and Geography of Africa, by the Moroccan diplomat al-Hasan al-Wazzan, better known as Johannes Leo Africanus. This work was written in Italian in the 1520s and first published in 1550; the new translation is the first version in any language to return to the original manuscript of 1526.
Anthony has just completed a third monograph on the problem of meaning in British architecture from 1945 to 1965. Drawing on extensive archival research, it traces the rise of a quasi-literary ‘criticism’ in the period, and details the efforts to understand the purpose of modern architecture in the absence of a vocabulary of historical forms.
He is also currently working on a translation, the first in English, of one of the key sources of John Milton’s 1634 masque Comus.
Books
Johannes Leo Africanus, The Cosmography and Geography of Africa, trans. Anthony Ossa-Richardson and Richard Oosterhoff (Penguin Classics, 2023).
A History of Ambiguity (Princeton, 2019)
Et Amicorum: Essays on Renaissance Philosophy and Humanism in Honour of Jill Kraye, eds Anthony Ossa-Richardson and Margaret Meserve (Brill, 2018)
The Devil's Tabernacle: The Pagan Oracles in Early Modern Thought (Princeton, 2013)
Recent Articles and Chapters in Books
‘The Idea of Unconscious Hypocrisy’, in The Co-Production of Hypocrisy, ed. David Nirenberg (forthcoming, 2026?)
‘Practical Divinity’, in The Oxford Handbook of George Eliot, eds Juliette Atkinson and Elisha Cohn (forthcoming, OUP, 2025)
‘The Disappearance of Leo Africanus: Rival Repertoires of Historical Scholarship in the Mid-Twentieth Century’, English Historical Review 139 (2024), 155–180.
(ed. and trans. from German) ‘English Architecture in 1963: A Newly Discovered View from Germany’, Architectural Research Quarterly 26.3 (2022), 222–35.
(ed. and trans. from French) César de Missy, ‘A Discourse on the Use of Ridicule in Religious Disputes’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters 7 (2022), 137–95.
‘Language, Poetry and Rhetoric’, in The Bloomsbury Cultural History of Ideas:1450–1650 (Bloomsbury, 2022), 143–63.
‘Proust, Typical Novelist: Literary Context as Type’, Modern Language Quarterly 81.2 (2022), 27–55.
‘The Phonostate at the End of History: Language, Nation, and a Scheme for World Peace in Edwardian South Africa’, Modern Intellectual History 19.4 (2021), 1058–80.
‘John Taylor Retailored’, Review of English Studies, 73 (2022), 59–77.
‘Known Unknowns: Sir John Davies’s Nosce Teipsum in Conversation’, English Literary Renaissance 51.3 (2021), 383–408
‘Allegory, Ambiguity, Accommodation', in Allegory Studies: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Vladimir Brljak (Routledge, 2021), 128–45.
'Pseudohistory and Metafiction in the Eighteenth Century', in Antiquity and Enlightenment Culture: New Approaches and Perspectives, eds Felicity Loughlin and Alexandre Johnston (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 19–40.