Rachel Bryan is a Postdoctoral Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Since 2018, she has taught First Year Composition, Writing in the Workplace, and a survey of 20th-century American literature. She has also served as a mentor teacher in the First Year Composition program for incoming composition instructors, tutored in the Judith Anderson Herbert Writing Center (JAHWC), and served as a coach in the JAHWC’s new tutor training program. Rachel earned her B.A. in English from Belmont University, her M.A. in English from Tulane University with a concurrent certificate in Documentary Literary Studies, and her Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville with a concurrent certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

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 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. She has volunteered as Vice President of the Flannery O’Connor Society since 2023.

Regularly Taught Courses

• • ENGL 101: English Composition I – “Topics in Poverty Studies”

• • ENGL 102: English Composition II – “Inquiry into the South”

• • ENGL 232: American Literature II – Civil War to the Present

• ENGL 295: Writing in the Workplace