Department of English

Academic Areas

• Transatlantic Literature – Late-19th- and Early-20th-Century
• History and Theory of the Novel
• Sound Studies
• Women’s and Gender Studies

Education:

• Ph.D., Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA

Years of Study:

• Mannes College of Music, The New School, New York City

Publications

•  “E. M. Forster’s Female Musicality: Inconclusive Counter-romance in A Room with a View.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 47, no. 4, 2024, pp. 107–25.
• “E. M. Forster’s Nuclear Aesthetics: A Closer Look at JML 47.4.” Invited online post for Indiana University Press. https://iupress.org/connect/blog/e-m-forsters-nuclear-aesthetics-a-closer-look-at-jml-47-4/
• “Review of Helen Rydstrand’s Rhythmic Modernism: Mimesis and the Short Story.” Affirmations: of the modern, vol. 6., no. 1, 2019, pp. 125–29.

Manuscripts in Submission:

• “Listening Troubles: Sound and Recorded Music in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.” 
• “Heterosexual Troubles: Music and Intimacy on the Stage of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled.” 

Manuscripts in Preparation:

• Music and the Making of the New Woman: Acoustic Autonomy in Early Modernism
• New Brave New World: Kazuo Ishiguro and the Global Post-Human
• “Acoustic Intimacies: W.B. Yeats and the Poetics of Drinking”
• “Deceptive Machines: Magnetic Tapes and the Farce of Belonging in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go”

Recent Courses

• “Narrative Lyrics: Poetics and the Novel in Dickens, Chopin, Proust, Wharton, and Cather” (Approaches to Literary Studies)
• “Perception and Opacity: Excesses of Literary Realism and Modernism in Kafka, James, and Ishiguro” (Approaches to Literary Studies)
• “Imperiled Rhythms: Music, Memory, and Uncertainty in 19th- and 20th-Century American Fiction and Global Culture” (American Literature and the Arts / Studies in American Literature)
• “Discourse Communities” (Introduction to Writing Across the Curriculum)

Biography:

Ryan James McGuckin is currently Teaching Associate Professor of English, specializing in late-19th and early-20th-century transatlantic literature, with an emphasis on how music, sound, and visual art intersect with public memory and social life. Prior to joining the faculty at Appalachian State University, he served as Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Languages at Southern University and A&M College in Louisiana.

His scholarship has been published in the Journal of Modern Literature and Affirmations: of the modern. He also organizes panels, delivers papers, and chairs sessions at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the International Conference on Virginia Woolf (ICVW).