Deirdre Egan-Ryan is a professor of English and director of faculty development at St. Norbert College. She specializes in 20th century American literature. Her scholarly work engages with modern American literature and culture, race, ethnic and women’s studies, especially in the context of interdisciplinary modernism. Her publications include essays on such literary figures as Zora Neale Hurston, Mina Loy and Gloria Anzaldúa.

Her edited collection, “Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement,” (March 2019) explores the role of social and political engagement by women writers in the development of American modernism. In this collection of scholarly essays that she co-edited with Jody Cardinal and Julia Lisella, Egan-Ryan contributes an essay on modernist children’s writer Virginia Lee Burton. Another strand of her research and writing examines best practices in community-engaged pedagogy, questions of vocation and their place in mission-based higher education. Her writing and workshops through the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE) help faculty and staff consider questions of meaning and purpose in their work with undergraduate college students. Egan-Ryan has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the MacArthur Foundation.