Overview
Ryan is a fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate at Cornell University in the Medieval Studies Program with a Graduate Minor in Media Studies where she researches dramatic and literary cultures of late Medieval England (especially in the region of East Anglia) through the lens of material media studies, critical posthumanism, queer studies, and theories of 'horror'. Despite existing primarily as a medievalist, she moonlights as a film scholar, in particular, of 20th-century horror cinema. Inversely, she is also interested in reverberations of the ‘medieval’ and medievalisms within horror cinema. She has presented at academic conferences on topics ranging from gender-bending rhetorical devices in Chaucer's House of Fame to the entanglement of independent filmmaking, the adult film industry, and the automation of meat-packing plants in horror films of the late 1970s. She is currently one of the Medieval Section Editors at The Sundial, an open-access publication facilitated through the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) dedicated to connecting premodern pasts with inclusive futures.
Research Focus
- Reception History of Ovid and Seneca
- Middle English & Old French Poetry
- Medieval Devotional Literature
- History of Theater
- Cinematic Medievalisms
- Theories of Horror
Publications
“Medieval Arthuriana Was Always Scary, but Not in the Way You’d Think: On Sir Gawain and The Green Knight,” Bright Lights Film Journal. (March 2022)