Cynthia Richards' scholarship covers eighteenth-century literature, narrative medicine, and trauma literature. The Project Lead for the funded National Endowment for the Humanities Grant Proposal, "The Healing Humanities: Creating Health Pathways on Campus and in the Community," in 2023, she believes strongly in the "centrality of the humanities to our psychological and physical well-being—how it helps us understand what it means to be human and to be a human who cares for themselves and others."