Department of English

Academic Specialty:

• Late-19th- and 20th-Century American and British Literature
• Literary Modernism
• Music and Media Studies
• Gender and the Novel
• Kazuo Ishiguro

Education:

• Ph.D., Louisiana State University

Years of Study:

• Mannes School 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:

• “Imaginative Listening: Sound and Recorded Music in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go” (Modern Fiction Studies: 9,000 words).
• “Intimate Aims: Music and Sexuality on the Stage of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled.” (Novel: A Forum on Fiction: 8,905 words).

Manuscripts in Preparation:

• Music and the Making of the New Woman: Aesthetic Modesty, Female Musicality, and the Subtlety of Self-Will in Early Modernism (at 60,000 words).
• New Brave New World: Kazuo Ishiguro and the Global Post-Human (proposal and CFP stages).
• “Acoustic Intimacies: W.B. Yeats and the Poetics of Drinking” (currently 3,000 words).

Recent Courses:

• “Constructions: Modern Identity and Discourse”
• “Art and Identity in Early Modernist Fiction”
• “Imperiled Rhythms: Music, Memory, and Uncertainty in American Fiction”

Biography:

Ryan James McGuckin 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. 

A native of New York’s Hudson Valley and the surrounding New York Metro Area, his research and publications analyze music’s and art’s reconciliatory ability to harmonize and complicate perceptions of public memory, urban life, and female autonomy.

For more, see his linked CV.