I meet Simon Richter the morning after a thunderstorm. I’ve wandered to a far corner of campus, pointed in the right direction by a friend on Locust Walk. I step around puddles, toeing stray leaves and browning petals mashed into the brick pathway leading me towards Gregory College House.
“You look like you’re here with a purpose,” he says in greeting me as I march into the lobby. My socks are slightly damp, and I’m shivering from the chill of the April showers, eager to sit down. Richter leads me to a study lounge, not bothering with the light switch, making a beeline for the armchairs flooded with daylight from the window and naturally props it open. The smell of rain once again hits me with force.
“My name is Simon Richter, and I've been at the University of Pennsylvania since 1998,” he begins. “I’m not quite sure how many years that is.” This marks his 27th.
“I'm currently the Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor of German Studies,” he continues. “I'd say I'm a professor in the Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies, also fondly known as FIGS.”
He is also the “co–instigator” of Climate Week at Penn and the founder of the 1.5* Minute Climate Lectures.
Richter doesn’t rush his words. He doesn’t need to. They arrive with quiet certainty, wrapped in thought and a trace of wry amusement, as if he knows how unlikely it is that anyone would become a German literature professor and end up talking about the climate crisis. But that is exactly what he has done.
Sitting by the open window, he introduces himself plainly, humbly—but nothing about his path has been linear. Literature, he explains, was “always really an important activity” for him as a kid, though not his only one. Richter grew up in Toronto, playing ice hockey and spending time outdoors. “I wound up in literature through a process of default,” he says, with a self–deprecating chuckle. “Nothing else interested me as much.”
So literature it was—first a master's degree in comparative literature from the University of Toronto, then a Ph.D. in German Studies from Johns Hopkins University. But Richter never kept his work confined to the page. He gravitated toward the boundaries of the field, seeking intersections: literature and gender, literature and the history of medicine, literature and the body. He was always looking for what lay between the lines. That curiosity eventually pulled him toward climate.
In 2011, Richter served as the academic director of Penn’s Berlin exchange program, a consortium partnership with peer institutions. While there, he needed to teach a seminar. Germany, at the time, was leading the global charge toward renewable energy—Richter wanted to understand why. Why were Germans willing to pay more for clean energy? Why was there a viable, powerful Green Party contrary to other nations? To answer these questions, Richter designed a course on the cultural history of the environmental movement in Germany.
To Richter, both phenomena had to have deep cultural roots—something embedded in German identity, history, or values that explained this embrace of environmental responsibility. “It was obvious to me,” Richter recalls. “It had to be cultural somehow.” So he took the seminar beyond the classroom. In addition to texts and lectures, his students met with local NGOs in Berlin working on sustainability and climate advocacy. Richter believed that to truly understand the culture in Germany, he had to “get out and meet” people, to start conversations. “I was thinking I was going to be talking about sustainability,” he says. “But I very soon realized this is more than sustainability. This is climate.” What began as academic curiosity became something more urgent.
“Like many people at that time, I had a vague sense of what climate change was,” he admits. “But I also had an assumption, an unexamined assumption, that, of course, governments were going to do something about it. Like, ‘What idiot would allow this to get totally out of hand?’” He laughs, but the humor is hollow. As Richter taught the course and talked to more people at climate and sustainability NGOs, he learned how little was being done to mitigate the threats posed by climate change.
“I was shocked,” he says. “And also scared.” He pauses. “At this point, my sons were 11 and nine years old. And having children and finding out about climate change at the same time is really bracing.”
What struck Richter most profoundly, though, was how his own academic specialty—the world of 18th–century German literature—was not excluded from this new narrative, but deeply entwined. Thus began his immersion in climate culture and what has become a rich, cross–disciplinary career in climate communication, education, and research.
Years later, Richter is still connecting those dots—and inviting others to join him.
One of his major initiatives is Project Poldergeist, a multimedia project he co–directs with animator and Weitzman School of Design professor Joshua Mosley. Through animated films and online storytelling, Project Poldergeist explores climate adaptation in the Netherlands and, soon, the Dutch Caribbean. “I bring my humanities tool set with me everywhere I go,” Richter explains. “It may appear from the outside that I'm doing something totally different from what I was trained to do, but I would dispute that. One of the major tools in my toolbox is storytelling.” Richter often finds that in science, engineering, and policy circles, "the story is missing, or the story is inadequately told." Humanities scholars, he argues, are equipped to evaluate and craft compelling narratives that can trigger “a transformative moment” in someone's consciousness and shift their understanding of the world. “I think of storytelling as a way of throwing fresh light on something, helping people to see things differently in a way that is effective, that allows for action, that brings us out of our inertia.”
In his experience working on interdisciplinary design teams in places like the Netherlands and Indonesia, Richter brought not only storytelling but also what he calls "creative reflection” to the table. Richter tells me that for him, creative reflection means using the same critical and imaginative thinking the humanities are known for to go beyond just identifying problems. Through his teaching, service, and research, Richter is trying to figure out how to make the humanities part of solutions. “I think for many people in the humanities, we place a lot of emphasis on critical reflection, critical thinking,” he explains. “I'm not saying that that's not important, but there's a tendency for that critical thinking to … bring things to a grinding halt, to point out all the problems, all the contradictions, everything that gets in the way.”
At Penn, Richter teaches two general requirement courses: Water Worlds and Forest Worlds, which use literature and film to reframe students' relationships with natural systems. He requires students to attend climate–related events on and off campus, reflect on them, and expand their exposure to the broader ecosystem of climate work. “They wind up realizing, ‘My gosh, it's such a big world. There's so many people working.’ They may find their niche.” Richter’s voice is tinged with pride as he talks about his students and the potential they have. “They might find a way in which the career they were contemplating has a climate application that they can really get into.”
In Water Worlds, students watch films like The Shape of Water and are challenged to explore how media and narrative shape our emotional and ethical relationships to nature. “Are you willing to embrace water and be embraced by water?” Richter asks all of his Water Worlds students this question, just as he asks me now. The course encourages students to move beyond thinking of water as a utility and instead to recognize it as something they can care for—an agent in its own right.
The same goes for forests and biodiversity in Forest Worlds. “A solution exists in the idea of care,” Richter says. “And care comes through acts of imagination.”
This spring, Richter led a Penn Global Seminar titled “Comparative Cultures of Resilience and Sustainability in the Netherlands and the United States.” Students traveled to the Netherlands over spring break, having spent seven weeks laying the groundwork for their trip. While abroad, they met with over 20 experts and gave presentations to leading Dutch institutions on topics from financing a floating neighborhood to communication strategies for local water authorities.
“I was so thrilled and proud to see them in action,” he says fondly. “Each of these 14 students now has proof–positive experience that their education at Penn, regardless of major, has prepared them to step into a climate–related career or to find the place where climate intersects with their career.”
When asked about the direction of climate research, Richter expresses concern. He notes the recent dismantling of global and local climate action frameworks and the cuts to federal funding and university support. “This [federal] administration seems bent on flying blind,” he tells me. But he also insists that we have “a strange ally”—climate change itself. “Climate change won’t politely sit on the sidelines. It will continue to unfold and will force governance, finance, the legal system, education, public health, agriculture, and more to respond. Sometimes adversity brings forth precisely the kind of leadership, action, and example that are required.”
Richter reminds me that “we weren’t on the right track before.” He believes “we need a breakthrough.”
He praises Penn’s recent momentum: the appointment of a vice provost for Climate Science, Policy and Action; strong enrollment in the Wharton School’s Environmental, Social and Governance Factors for Business concentration; and growing climate initiatives across schools. But he is also watching closely. “The question now that climate is on the government’s taboo list is if Penn will persist and how it will protect and support climate research and teaching,” he says. “Will Penn students stand by their conviction that climate change cannot be ignored?” He believes the case for a climate literacy requirement is stronger than ever.
As for his own future? Richter hopes to secure funding for continued student collaboration on Project Poldergeist, to keep producing research–based animated videos that advocate for change. Beyond that, he intends to “continue to do all [he] can” to keep nudging Penn—through research, teaching, and institutional critique—to “rise to the occasion.”
