Melissa Ryan

Education

• BA: Literary Studies, Middlebury College, 1993
• MA: University of Arizona, 2000
• PhD: University of Arizona, 2004

Courses Taught

• American literature
• Race, class, and gender in American literature
• Literature and the environment
• Social Justice Studies
• Writing I & II

Research, Publications, & Presentations

Research & Publications

• “Dangerous Refuge: Richard Wright and the Swimming Hole.” African American Review 50.1 (Spring 2017): 27-40.
• “Quicksand, Passing, and Idlewild: Black Bourgeoisie in the Wilderness.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 23.4 (November 2016): 770-97.
• “Others and Origins: 19th Century Suffragists and the ‘Indian Problem.’” Women and the Struggle for Equal Rights: Challenges, Complexities, and Variations in 19th-Century Female Activism. University of Rochester Press (2012).
• “Rena’s Two Bodies: Gender and Whiteness in Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars.” Studies in the Novel 43.1 (Spring 2011).
• “Republican Mothers and Indian Wives: Lydia Maria Child’s Indian Fiction.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 56.1 (2010): 33-70.
• “The Indian Problem as a Woman’s Question: S. Alice Callahan’s Wynema: A Child of the Forest.” ATQ: American Transcendental Quarterly 21.1 (March 2007): 23-45.
• “At Home in America: John Fante and the Imaginative American Self.” Studies in American Fiction 32.2 (Autumn 2004): 185-214.
• “The Enclosure of America: Civilization and Confinement in Willa Cather's O Pioneers!” American Literature 75.2 (June 2003): 275-303.
• “Civil Bodies: Legal Language and the Ritual of Sacrifice.” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 19 (1999): 67-98.

Awards/Honors

• Kruson Award for Excellence in Teaching, Alfred University, 2005, 2007, 2011
• Abigail Allen Award, Alfred University, 2016
• Florence Hemley Schneider Dissertation Prize, University of Arizona, 2004
• Phi Beta Kappa