Dr Derek Ryan

Derek Ryan is Senior Lecturer in Modernist Literature. He joined the University of Kent in September 2013, having previously taught at the University of Exeter and the University of Glasgow, where he completed his PhD funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He is the founding Series Editor of Virginia Woolf - Variations (Edinburgh UP) and Literature Subject Editor for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. In 2023-24 he was awarded a Sassoon Fellowship at the Bodleian Libraries, Univerity of Oxford.

Derek’s primary expertise is in modernist literature, animal studies and the environmental humanities. His latest books are the Cambridge Edition of Virginia Woolf's Flush: A Biography (Cambridge UP, 2026), coedited with Linden Peach and Jane Goldman, and A History of the Bloomsbury Group (Cambridge UP, 2025). He is currently writing a monograph tha explores the more-than-human significance of fire in modernist literature and is provisionally titled The Modernist Pyrocene: Literature, Fire and the Environment. His initial research related to this project includes an article on Virginia Woolf, fire ritual and heatwaves in Woolf Studies Annual and one in progress on D.H. Lawrence's Kangaroo, Indigeneity and Australian Bushfire. His journal articles on other topics include a study of Katherine Mansfield's animal aesthetics, published in Modern Fiction Studies in 2018, and an examination of the oesophagus and indigestion in James Joyce's Ulysses, to appear in 2026 in Modernist Cultures.

Derek is the author of three previous monographs. Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature (Cambridge UP, 2022), reveals how the Bloomsbury group's fascination with beasts - from pests to pets, tiny insects to big game - became an integral part of their critique of modernity. Across chapters on hunting, zoos, companion animals and entomology, the book argues that for Leonard Woolf, David Garnett, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, profound shifts in interspecies relations were intimately connected to questions of imperialism, race, gender, sexuality and technology. Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh UP, 2015; translated into Turkish in 2019) offers a wide-ranging account of theoretical approaches to animality in modern and contemporary thought. Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life (Edinburgh UP, 2013) interrogates the relationship between culture and nature, embodiment and environment, human and nonhuman, life and matter across Woolf's writings, bringing modernism into dialogue with Deleuzian philosophy, new materialism and posthumanism.

Over the past decade, he has edited and coedited several volumes that develop his interests in reading both modernism and literary animals in broader historical and international contexts. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals (Cambridge UP, 2023) and Reading Literary Animals: Medieval to Modern (Routledge, 2019) survey the role of animals across literary history. Cross-Channel modernisms (Edinburgh UP, 2020) charts the rise in modernist aesthetics and cultural exchange between key figures in Britain, France and beyond in the early twentieth century. Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace: Aesthetics and Theory (Clemson UP/Liverpool UP, 2020) examines Woolf's response to war in Europe and her efforts to coneptualise peace. The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group (Bloomsbury, 2018) showcases contemproary scholarship on Bloomsbury and such topics as feminism, sexuality, empire, philosophy, class, nature, politics and the arts. 

Derek’s supervision of PhD projects to date covers topics including modernist literature, the Anthropocene, sleep, vermin, veganism, deforestation, psychoanalysis, medical humanities and speculative fiction. He would be keen to supervise doctoral research relating to any of his research interests.        

Derek has been appointed external examiner for PhD projects at Aarhus University, Denmark (2018), Durham University (2019), Sorbonne Université, Paris IV (2019),King’s College London (2020), Queen’s University, Canada (2021), University of Sydney (2022), UNSW Sydney (2023), University of Pretoria (2023), University of Bergamo (2024), Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris (2024), and University of Oxford (2026).

He has acted as a reader for various publishers and journals, including Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Stanford University Press, Edinburgh University Press, Routledge, Bloomsbury, Palgrave, Ohio State University Press, University of Wales Press, Review of English Studies, Modernism/modernity, Twentieth-Century Literature, Modernist Cultures, Feminist Modernist Studies, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, Mosaic, Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture and Studies in the Novel.

He has co-organised numerous conferences and events relating to his primary research interests, including Kent’s annual Virginia Woolf Lecture and ‘Virginia Woolf, Europe and Peace: the 28th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf’, which welcomed over 200 delegates to Kent over four days in June 2018. He is a founding member of the Kent Animal Humanities Network, which holds annual events for staff and students at the University. He has received invitations to give keynotes and lectures in the USA, France, Sweden, Netherlands, and the UK, including for the National Trust at Sissinghurst Castle Garden.

Derek’s administrative experience at Kent includes the roles of Interim Assessment Lead (2025-26), MA Lead in English (2024-), Director of Graduate Studies at the Paris campus (2018-20), Director of Graduate Studies for PG taught programmes (2016-18) and Research Seminar Organiser (2014-15 and 2023-24). He has chaired Graduate Studies Committee, In-Stage Assessment Review Boards and Exam Boards, and served as a member of the Policy and Planning Group, Faculty Paris Marketing Advisory Board and University Programme Approval and Curriculum Design Stakeholder Group.