Laurel Ryan

Laurel Ryan’s research interests include transatlantic and transnational literary relationships, with a particular focus on nineteenth-century Canadian medievalism. She is also interested in the development of ideas of race in the nineteenth century. Her work has been published in journals including Mosaic: an Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Studies in Canadian Literature, South Asian Review, Canadian Literature, and others. With Anna Czarnowus, she co-edited the book Medievalism and Slavic Popular Culture (Arc Humanities Press, 2025).

Her current projects include the monograph Whiteout: Race and Medievalism in Early Canadian Literature, which examines how Canadian authors of the long nineteenth century participated in transnational discourses of whiteness as an emergent racial category by inventing a European medieval past for Canada.

Ph.D.
University of Toronto, 2015

M.A. 
University of Western Ontario, 2007

B.Sc. (Hons)
University of Western Ontario, 2006

Nineteenth-century transatlantic and transnational literatures, Medievalism, Canadian literature, and World literatures in English.