Today, I am a doctoral candidate in English Literature at University of Nevada, Reno, and a writer of fiction and visual art. Through historical materialist-inflected readings of global anglophone contemporary literature, I integrate spaces, atmospheres, and ecocritcism to consider formal and affective infrastructures of late capitalist literary production. My research often returns to the fourfold structure of tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony with regard to allegorical readings of Commonwealth twentieth and twenty-first century texts.
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.
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 house music, ambient, IDM, jazz, or classical. 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 