Ryan Hediger

Ryan Hediger joined Kent State’s English department in 2011. His research and teaching interests focus on U.S. literature, the environmental humanities, and posthumanism, with particular engagement in the growing transdisciplinary fields of animal studies and ecocriticism. His articles have appeared in such journals as Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Animal Studies Journal, Studies in American Naturalism, and The Hemingway Review, where he serves on the editorial advisory board.  His approach to teaching emphasizes the transformative potential of encounters with texts of many kinds, using group inquiry and discussion to open perspectives on issues that matter to readers and our cultures.  

Recent scholarly activity has concentrated on a forthcoming book he is editing and contributing to, Planet Work: Rethinking Labor and Leisure in the Anthropocene. His monograph, Homesickness: Posthumanism, Eco-cosmopolitanism, and the Desire for Place in the U.S., was published in 2019. It treats homesickness in a range of authors, including Marilynne Robinson, Annie Proulx, Toni Morrison, and Ernest Hemingway, arguing that nostalgia is an unavoidable and relentlessly particular element of selfhood and deserves reappraisal. He edited the essay collection Animals and War (2013) and coedited Animals and Agency (2009).   

Selected Publications

“Old Chestnuts: Seeding Alternative Communities and Alternative Futures in/with The Overstory.” Western American Literature. Forthcoming.   

“‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ as an Allegory of the Anthropocene.” The Hemingway Review, vol. 41, no. 1 (Fall 2022): 8-27.    

“‘An Element of Present Danger’: Jogging, Football, and Anxieties of Vulnerability in 1970s Sporting Literature.” In American Literature in Transition, 1970-1980. Ed. Kirk Curnutt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 88-101.  

“Animal Suicide and ‘Anthropodenial.’” Animal Sentience: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Animal Feeling, vol. 2, no. 20, article 16 (2018): 1-3.

“Animals in War.” In The Palgrave International Handbook of Animal Abuse Studies. Eds. Jennifer Maher, Harriet Pierpoint, and Piers Beirne. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 475-94. 

“Becoming with Animals: Sympoiesis and the Ecology of Meaning in London and Hemingway.” Studies in American Naturalism vol. 11, no. 1 (2016): 5-22. 

“Breaking Away and Vital Materialism: Embodying Dreams of Social Mobility via the Bicycle Assemblage.” In Culture on Two Wheels: The Bicycle in Literature and Film. Eds. Jeremy Withers and Daniel P. Shea. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. 263-80.

“ ‘Shot . . . crippled and gotten away’: Animals and War Trauma in Hemingway.” In Teaching Hemingway and War. Ed. Alex Vernon. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2016. 143-56. 

“Dogs of War: The Biopolitics of Loving and Leaving the U.S. Canine Forces in Vietnam.”  Animal Studies Journal vol. 2, no. 1 (2013): 55-73.

“Timothy Treadwell's Grizzly Love as Freak Show: The Uses of Animals, Science, and Film.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment vol. 19, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 82-100.

“The Elephant in the Writing Room: Sympathy and Weakness in Hemingway’s ‘Masculine Text,’ The Garden of Eden.”  The Hemingway Review vol. 31, no. 1 (Fall 2011): 79-95.

“Hunting, Fishing, and the Cramp of Ethics in The Old Man and the Sea, Green Hills of Africa,   and Under Kilimanjaro.”  The Hemingway Review vol. 27, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 35-59.