Tim Ryan

Professor
20th Century American Literature & Culture, Modernism, African American Literature, Southern Studies

Office: RH 227
Email: tryan@niu.edu

Yoknapatawpha Blues: Faulkner’s Fiction and Southern Roots Music. (Louisiana State UP, 2015).
Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery since "Gone With the Wind." (Louisiana State UP, 2008).
Winner of the Jules & Frances Landry Award

"Fabbulous Monsters: Faulkner, Alexander Woollcott, and American Literary Culture.” Faulkner and Print Culture, edited by Jay Watson, Jaime Harker, and James Thomas (UP of Mississippi, 2017)
“Roots and Popular Music: Literary Encounters with Blues and Jazz.” American Literature in Transition, 1910-1920, edited by Mark W. Van Wienen (Cambridge UP, 2017).
“Screwball Curves and Blues Licks: Hollywood Comedy and African American Music in Faulkner and Hurston.” Faulkner and Hurston, edited Christopher Rieger and Andrew Leiter (Southeast Missouri State UP, 2017).
“‘Go to Jail About This Spoonful’: Narcotic Determinism and Human Agency in ‘That Evening Sun’ and ‘A Spoonful Blues.’” Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas, edited by Jay Watson and James Thomas (UP of Mississippi, 2016)
“‘The Matter with Your Line’: Gender, Sexual, and Racial Politics in Charley Patton’s ‘Pony Blues.’” Journal of American Culture, vol. 38, no. 1, March 2015.
“‘A Little Music Aint About the Nicest Thing a Fellow Can Have’: Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Country Songs.” Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 3, Summer 2014.
“‘A Whole Family of Hurstons’: Black and White Kinship in Zora Neale Hurston’s Family Narratives.” Critical Insights: Family, edited by John V. Knapp (Salem P, 2013).