Simon Richter is the Class of 1942 Endowed Term Professor of Germanic Studies. His research and teaching focus on cultural aspects of climate adaptation and resilience in the Netherlands, Germany, Indonesia, and the United States. As an environmental humanist, he engages in activities that blur distinctions between traditional scholarship, urban design, and environmental activism. He instigated the Penn 1.5* Minute Climate Lectures, starting in 2019, and, with Billy Fleming, initiated Climate Week at Penn in 2020. He frequently collaborates with colleagues in the Weitzman School of Design. In 2018-19, he was a member of One Resilient Semarang, an international team of urban designers, engineers, ecologists, and urban and environmental activists from Indonesia, the Netherlands and the United States, organized by Penn Professor of Practice Matthijs Bouw. Since then, he’s been on similar design teams in Amsterdam and the Eastern part of the Netherlands. He is the PI together with Bouw and Joshua Mosley for a novel Penn Global research project involving theater, serious gaming, and documentary filmmaking on future transboundary climate migration in the Netherlands and Germany.
