Ryan Cordell is a Ph.D. Candidate in the University of Virginia’s English Department. He currently directs UVA’s Writing Center and is writing his dissertation. It argues that the apocalyptic rhetoric of antebellum evangelical periodicals and sermons directly informs the fiction of writers such as Stowe, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, and Lippard, shaping the ways they portray and interpret “signs of the times” in their fiction.
Ryan also manages the Red Schoolhouse project, a new website that aims to supplement writing instruction at UVA and bring UVA’s Little Red Schoolhouse writing curriculum into high schools and colleges around the country.