USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Literature and Creative Writing
Faculty Advisor: William Handley
Ryan joined USC as a Provost Fellow in 2011, after completing the Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University. He completed a BA in English at Brigham Young University in 2007 and an MFA in English from Rutgers University in 2009. At USC, Ryan has written about the problems and consolations of belief, doubt, secularism, and the tribes of the in-between. His first novel, Elders (Hogarth/Random House, 2013), appeared in his third year of the PhD program and received positive reviews in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Slate, and The LA Review of Books, among others. The book was featured prominently on NPR’s “Fresh Air with Terry Gross.” His second novel, Westergard, forthcoming from Hogarth/Random House, is another study in zeal, but now in a secularized context: an ad hoc group of friends and fellow travelers strike out from the Marxist-academic camp, pledging themselves to more “active” forms of resistance that quickly get out of hand. Ryan has accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Tampa beginning fall 2017.