Dr Rachel Bryan

Dr Rachel Bryan is a Fellow, College Assistant Professor, and Director of Studies in English at Magdalene.

Dr Bryan was brought up in Durham, where she attended Durham Johnston Comprehensive School. She completed her BA, MPhil, and AHRC-funded PhD at Jesus College, Cambridge, and was a visiting student at Harvard. Prior to joining Magdalene, she held fellowships at St John's College, Cambridge, and All Souls College, Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Dr Bryan works on and teaches British and American literature of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. In broad terms, her research focuses on literary responses to war and conflict; she is particularly interested in the role played by literary style in both facilitating the work of consolation and subjecting it to ethical interrogation.

Her first monograph, Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War (Cambridge: CUP, 2025), examines post-war writings from across the twentieth century which register the role played by consolatory counterfactuals in individual and national responses to mass violence. The book uncovers an under-studied grouping of writers on the borderline between modernist experimentalism and classical realism, and argues that the formal, stylistic, and ethical complexity of their work arises from a sensibility attuned to both the regenerative impulses that accompany violent destruction and the value placed upon consolation and tradition within war-ravaged societies.

Current research comprises a number of projects centred around works that challenge or reimagine legal personhood through their treatment of beings denied the recognition, protections, and dignity instilled by this rights-bearing fiction. The first is co-editing The Other House, Henry James’s 1896 novel of infanticide and collective guilt, for The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James. A second monograph project, Post-war Guilt and the Literary Imagination, aims to reveal the hold that diverse forms of war guilt exerted on mid-century judicial and literary landscapes; it also suggests that debates between legal and extra-legal formulations of culpability contributed to the widespread “return to realism” after 1945. Dr Bryan is working concurrently on a third book, Vanishing Acts: Literature and More-Than-Legal Personhood. The project draws on methodologies from the interdisciplinary field of literature and human rights to explore how literary texts attempt to answer the question “What is a person?”

Research Interests

• Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture
• Prose Style
• Literature and the Law
• Literary Realism
• The Novel
• War Literature
• Memory and Modern Narrative
• Henry James

Professional Affiliations

• FHEA (Fellow of the Higher Education Academy)