2020 Retiring Faculty

Judylyn Ryan

Associate Professor of English
(1998-2020)

Judylyn S. Ryan, the first African American woman to be awarded tenure at Ohio Wesleyan University, retired in 2020 after a distinguished academic career.

Judylyn received her A.B. from Georgetown University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She brought an unusually broad and rich academic experience to OWU, having previously taught at Hunter College, the Divinity School at Harvard University, and Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Judylyn’s desire to work closely with undergraduates drew her to Ohio Wesleyan’s English and Black World Studies departments in 1998.

At OWU, Judylyn taught a wide array of courses in 19th- and 20th-century African American literature and film, African diasporic literatures and cinema, and Black women’s literature and film, as well as the College Writing Seminar. She broadened OWU’s curriculum geographically, so that it embraced Caribbean and African diasporic cultural production. An exacting teacher, Judylyn held her students to high standards. She demanded they work up to their potential, and they grew quickly under her tutelage.

As one of a small number of faculty of color on campus, Judylyn found herself cast in the role of mentor, particularly (although by no means exclusively), to African American students. It was a role she embraced wholeheartedly. Judylyn believed in the importance of one-on-one contact and dialog. Consequently, the hall outside her office frequently resembled the waiting room of a trusted small-town doctor. Here, her current and former students caught up or met for the first time and pondered the “weekly meditation” that Judylyn posted for their benefit. Periodically, Judylyn’s resonant voice would become audible through her closed door, in mock-incredulity at a particularly inadequate answer, or, more characteristically, in a rich, rolling laugh that was geniality itself.

Judylyn’s dedication to her students did not prevent her from becoming an accomplished scholar. Her monograph, Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women’s Film and Literature, analyzes the writing of Ntozake Shange and Zora Neale Hurston, the films of Julie Dash and Euzhan Palcy, and the poetry of Grace Nichols, among much else. This capaciousness and originality led the critic William B. Covey to characterize Judylyn as a “trailblazer” exploring hitherto unmapped territory. Spirituality as Ideology also features a multifaceted engagement with Toni Morrison, confirming Judylyn’s stature as one of the major authorities on the Nobel laureate. Judylyn’s investigation of Morrison has unfolded in a series of lectures and publications and continues in one of her current book projects, entitled Morrisonian Democracy: The Literary Praxis of a Cultural Philosophy.

Among many other gifts, Judylyn has a knack for being ahead of the curve. For more than a decade, her work has grappled with the racial and social justice issues that the Black Lives Matter movement thrust into the public conscience. As the Benjamin T. Spencer lecturer from 2014-16, Judylyn explored such concepts as white fragility and the neurophysiological underpinnings of prejudice, which she provocatively termed “Racism Spectrum Disorder.” Her other book-in-progress, The Epidemiology of Racism, promises to be a major contribution on a topic that remains all-too timely.