Dr Derek Ryan
About
Derek’s primary research specialisms are in modernist literature, animal studies and critical theory, and he has published widely in each of these areas. His first monograph, Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life (Edinburgh UP, 2013), explores the relationship between culture and nature, embodiment and environment, human and nonhuman, life and matter across Woolf’s writings. In doing so, it brings modernism into dialogue with Deleuzian philosophy, posthumanism and new materialism. His second monograph, Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh UP, 2015), offers a wide-ranging account of theoretical approaches to animality in modern and contemporary thought, with chapters on ‘Animals as Humans’, ‘Animal Ontology’, ‘Animal Life’ and ‘Animal Ethics’. The book includes extended discussions of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Martha Nussbaum and Donna Haraway among others, as well as readings of contemporary literary texts by Angela Carter, JM Coetzee, Paul Auster and Jonathan Safran Foer. Ideas relating to these books are developed in various essays and articles, as well as in his guest edited special issues of the journals Deleuze Studies (‘Deleuze, Virginia Woolf and Modernism’; co-edited with Laci Mattison, 2013), Virginia Woolf Miscellany (‘Woolf and Materiality’, 2014) and Twentieth-Century Literature (‘Modernist Ethics and Posthumanism’; co-edited with Mark West, 2015).
His more recent publications build upon his interests in both modernism and literary animal studies. The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group (Bloomsbury, 2018), co-edited with Stephen Ross, contains 20 chapters showcasing contemporary scholarship on the set of influential writers, artists and thinkers whose members included Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, EM Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell and Duncan Grant. The volume brings together overview essays with detailed illustrative case studies covering topics such as feminism, sexuality, empire, philosophy, class, nature, politics and the arts. Reading Literary Animals: Medieval to Modern (Routledge, 2019), co-edited with Karen Edwards and Jane Spencer, consists of 15 essays covering a range of questions concerning animals as they appear through literary history.