Born in Brooklyn, New York, I lived in Bay Ridge until I was eight. My family moved to Westchester County for a few years before we crossed the country to Portland, Oregon, where I went to middle school and high school. I returned east for college, and graduated with a BA magna cum laude in English literature and a philosophy minor from NYU.
I moved to Bushwick in 2010 and worked in marketing and real estate, and traveled with what I earned (given the chance, I’ll always go back to Italy). The entire time I was writing. I eventually returned to academia by matriculating into the Creative Writing MSc at Edinburgh University. I went on to do an MFA in Fiction at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.
Today I’m in the fourth year of a PhD in English Literature at the University of Nevada, Reno. My interests include the future of the novel, allegory as a hermeneutic, historical materialism, rhetorical tropes, and theories of cultural change.
I’m a concept-driven literary scholar whose work treats literature as a site for thinking about form, temporality, and interpretation. My criticism develops transferable reading practices—often drawing on philosophy and critical theory—that show how novels generate meaning through resonance, scale, and self-reflexive form. I theorize modernism and its afterlives, with particular attention to how narrative structures mediate historical time, ethical perception, and utopian possibility. Stylistically, I favor essayistic rigor over archival exhaustiveness, positioning literary texts as laboratories for thinking rather than objects to be mastered.
While I work, I like to listen to deep house, balearic, ambient, IDM, jazz, and classical music. In my free time, I paint and draw, practice kundalini yoga, enjoy West Coast IPAs, and bike to the Truckee to sit on my favorite cottonwood tree.
I hope you can enjoy some of my work on this site. To learn more or ask me anything, email DanielRyanAdler@gmail.com.
Daniel the Writer 