Rachel Bryan is a Herbert Fellow and Postdoctoral Lecturer at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville where she teaches composition, business writing, and works in the Judith Anderson Herbert Writing Center. She completed her PhD at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2023 with a concurrent certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Rachel earned her BA in English from Belmont University, her MA in English from Tulane University with a concurrent certificate in Documentary Literary Studies, and her PhD from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville with a concurrent certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. 

Her dissertation, Bone Tired: Resisting Labor in Southern Women’s Fiction, explores the aesthetics and social contexts of women refusing gendered and informal labor in southern literature from Depression-era fiction to the present day. Her research interests include narratives of poverty and working-class identity in 20th- and 21st-century southern literature, gender and sexuality in relation to labor in contemporary American literature, and materialist feminist theory in conversation with southern literature. Her essay on grief and adult daughters in Eudora Welty’s and Jesmyn Ward’s fiction will appear in the forthcoming volume of The Eudora Welty Review.  She has volunteered as the Vice President of the Flannery O’Connor Society since 2023.