Laurel Ryan

Laurel Ryan
  • Faculty
  • Associate Professor of English
  • Co-director of Graduate Studies

Biography

Laurel Ryan’s research interests include transatlantic and transnational literary relationships, with a particular focus on nineteenth-century Canadian medievalism. She is also interested in the development of ideas of race in the nineteenth century. Her work has been published in journals including Mosaic: an Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Studies in Canadian Literature, South Asian Review, Canadian Literature, and others.

Her current projects include the monograph Whiteout: Race and Medievalism in Early Canadian Literature, which examines how Canadian authors of the long nineteenth century participated in transnational discourses of Whiteness as an emergent racial category by inventing a European medieval past for Canada. She is also currently co-editing a book on Medievalism and Slavic Popular Culture.

Education

Ph.D., University of Toronto, 2014
M.A., University of Western Ontario, 2007

Student Research/Collaboration

  • Nineteenth-century transatlantic and transnational literatures
  • Canadian literature
  • World literatures in English
  • Digital Humanities