Professor Ryan received her B.A. from Sydney University, Australia, and her Dr. phil. from the University of Münster, Germany. Before coming to Harvard, she taught for many years at Smith College. In addition to receiving grants from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (including the prestigious "Humboldtforschungspreis" in 2009-2010) and the National Endowment for the Humanities, she was the recipient of the Basilius Award in Germanics and was twice awarded the prize for best article of the year in The German Quarterly. Her scholarship was recognized by the award of the Walter Channing Cabot Prize in 1994 and her teaching by a Harvard College Professorship in 1998. She has been active on several committees of the Modern Language Association. At Harvard, she served for six years on Faculty Council. She was the 2017 President of the Modern Humanities Research Council (U.K.) Her research interests are 19th- and 20th-century literature, with special emphases on German lyric poetry, German colonial theory and fiction, 20th-century modernism, comparative modernisms, postwar German literature, and the contemporary novel. She has taught and written on Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch, Paul Celan, Christa Wolf, Günter Grass, Durs Grünbein, and W. G. Sebald, among others. Her most recent article is "Zwischen Zeilen und Zeiten: Museales Erzählen in den Prosafiktionen W.G. Sebalds" (see publications below). An essay on Paul Celan is currently in press.

Additional information, including a select bibliography, is available at http://scholar.harvard.edu/jryan/