About
Ryan Sweet is a Lecturer in Humanities and the Programme Director of the Humanities Foundation Year. He is a specialist in literary and cultural disability studies and his first book, about how prosthetic body parts were imagined in Britain and American in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, is available for free (thanks to generous funding from the Welcome Trust) via the Springer Open Access platform. Ryan is now researching the entangled cultural histories of disability and nonhuman animals in nineteenth-century Britain.
Linked to his research interests, which centre on concepts of accessibility and inclusion, Ryan is highly committed to widening participation in Higher Education. As a first-generation university graduate from a rural working-class Cornish family, after completing his BA (Hons), MA, and PhD (all in English) at the University of Exeter, Ryan went on to play a key role in designing and leading the University of Plymouth’s highly successful Humanities Foundation Year (2018-2020) before taking up his post at Swansea in June 2020. Ryan is passionate about enabling students from non-traditional and/or disenfranchised backgrounds to thrive at university.
Ryan is a contributor to the peer-reviewed online resource Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures and Contexts and a member of Swansea’s Medical Humanities Research Centre (MHRC).