1925 MGM Film Poster

Prof. Barbara Ryan teaches in an interdisciplinary small college at the National University of Singapore. Her training in American literature, and interests in African American expression, have developed into courses on the post-soul aesthetic in literature, photography and film; on transactional exchanges of the Black Pacific; on nationalism and the arts in Singapore; on the Romance and the Realist novel; on African American drama; and on popular US fiction. At present, she is completing a book on early US reception of Lew Wallace’s book, Ben-Hur (1880) and starting work on reception of US best-sellers in New Zealand and Australia at the turn of the last century. Her first book, Love, Wages, Slavery (Illinois 2006) interrogates 19th-century US domestic advice literature, ex-slaves’ narratives, and the domestic lives of writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. She has also co-edited two collections of scholarly essays, Reading Acts (Tennessee 2002) and Bigger than Ben-Hur (Syracuse, forthcoming).

In the University Scholars Programme in Singapore, Barbara teaches writing and critical thinking in a course that draws on Ruskin, Latour, Turkel and research on human-technology interaction. She is interested in use of the personal essay to teach skills that transfer to academic writing, in probes of ‘modest’ reading, and in the varied ways in which readers of all kinds engage imaginative fiction. Before she arrived in Singapore, she taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Missouri-Kansas City after completing a Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill which included coursework at Duke University.

Barbara would be delighted to meet people interested in any of her interests, and can be contacted on email at usprbt@nus.edu.sg.  She will also be coming to Centre for the Book Events and we hope you will make her very welcome during her visit, which extends for about another month.  Toward the end of her visit, we will have an opportunity to hear from Barbara about her work.