Ryan Schneider

Ph.D., Duke University, 1998

Specialization

American Literature

Research Areas:
19th-century American Literature; Transcendentalism; African American literature; Public Intellectuals and Intellectual History

Ryan Schneider holds a B.A. in History and Literature from Harvard as well as an M.A. and a Ph.D. in English from Duke.  He specializes in nineteenth-century American and African American literature with particular emphasis on Transcendentalism, Critical Race Theory, and intellectual history. His current research focuses on Cognitive Literary Studies, and his book, The Public Intellectualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. Du Bois: Emotional Dimensions of Race and Reform, was published in 2010 by Palgrave Macmillan as part of their Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance series.

Professor Schneider’s articles have appeared in American Transcendental Quarterly, Arizona Quarterly, and edited collections including No More Separate Spheres!: A Next Wave American Studies Reader, (Duke University Press), and Boys Don’t Cry?: Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the U.S., (Columbia University Press). He also has contributed essays to The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States and W.E.B. Du Bois: An Encyclopedia. He currently is working on a book that examines the role of Transcendentalism in the construction and consolidation of various dimensions of ethnic identity in antebellum New England.

In addition to serving as Director of Graduate Studies for the English Department, Professor Schneider teaches a wide range of courses in both English and American Studies.  He has received numerous teaching awards at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and is a two-time recipient of the Center for Undergraduate Instructional Excellence Fellowship. He also is a founding member of the Cancer, Culture, and Community Program (CCC): a joint venture involving the College of Liberal Arts and the Oncological Sciences Center in Discovery Park that explores the human response to cancer as expressed through art and literature.