Department of English

Academic Areas:

• Modernism and Modernity
• Literature and Music
• Sound Studies
• Gender Studies
• History and Theory of the Novel

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. 
• 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.”
• “Intimate Aims: Music and Sexuality on the Stage of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled.”

Manuscripts in Preparation:

• Music and the Making of the New Woman: Aesthetic Modesty, Female Musicality, and the Subtlety of Self-Will in Early Modernism
• New Brave New World: Kazuo Ishiguro and the Global Post-Human 
• “Acoustic Intimacies: W.B. Yeats and the Poetics of Drinking”

Recent Courses:

• “Narrative Lyrics: Poetics and the Novel” (Approaches to Literary Studies)
• “Art and Identity in Early Modernist Fiction” (Approaches to Literary Studies)
• “Imperiled Rhythms: How Music is Valuable to Fictional Worlds” (American Literature and the Arts)
• “Discourse, Genres, and Society” (Intro to Writing Across the Curriculum)

Biography:
A native of New York’s Hudson Valley and the surrounding New York Metro Area, Ryan James McGuckin’s research and publications analyze music’s and art’s reconciliatory ability to harmonize and complicate perceptions of public memory, urban life, and female selfhood. He has published with Journal of Modern Literature and Affirmations: of the modern and most recently conducted conference panels, presented papers, and chaired sessions at the Modern Language Association and the International Conference on Virginia Woolf. He is currently  Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Appalachian State University, working in and around literary modernism and musical culture. Previously he was Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Literature and Languages at Southern University and A&M College, Louisiana’s largest historically black college and university.