Elise L. Ryan

Elise's Affiliations: Provost Academy Courses, Vibrant Media Lab, Center for Creativity

I earned my doctorate in English Renaissance Literature from Indiana University, Bloomington. My research interests have always circled around Renaissance poetry and poetics; Early Modern women's writing; performance culture; theories of vision, image, and perception; material culture; and the experience of faith and religious practice. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh, I taught at Columbus College of Art and Design where my scholarship and teaching expanded to 20th and 21st century questions of visual representation and the relationship between design and literature. Crossing historical and genre boundaries makes me eager to practice interdisciplinary study and collaborative teaching. Now more than ever, I consider myself an early-modernist. I like to think of my classrooms as studio spaces.

I’ve always been a thinker, writer, and reader excited by leaps between categories and atypical juxtapositions. I want to encourage that in my students through my course design, assignments, and classroom environments. I teach with critical making practices, and my courses often involve outside the classroom experiences, both on and off Pitt’s campus. It’s important to me that what we study in the classroom bumps up against all of our lived experiences and that we look to diverse voices as sources of authority.

To these ends, I serve as the Experiential Learning Coordinator in the English Department, and I am exploring different writing forms, such as the lyric essay, video essay, and critical arts writing. I am currently being supported in the latter as a Fellow with Critical Insight, a 7-month Fellowship co-sponsored by Pittsburgh Public Theater and American Theater Magazine with the aim of supporting Pittsburgh-based arts criticism.

Courses Taught

Words & Images

Secret Pittsburgh

Medieval Imagination

Milton to Minecraft: Art, Nature, Technology