Department of English

Academic Areas:

• British Literature - Victorian and Early 20th Century
• American Literature - Late 19th and Early 20th Century
• Modernism
• 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. 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.”
• “Disturbing Dynamics: 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 and 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 in Dickens, Chopin, Proust, and Cather” (Approaches to Literary Studies)
• “Perception and Opacity: Excesses of Literary Realism and Modernism in James, Kafka, 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 in the Department of English at Appalachian State University, working in late-Victorian realism and early-20th-century transatlantic literature. Between realist and modernist periods, his research and publications analyze how music and art complicate perceptions of public memory and social life. 

A native of New York’s Hudson Valley and Metro Area, previously he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Languages at Southern University and A&M College, Louisiana’s largest historically black college and university. 

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.