Alongside teaching, Ryan is engaged in several ongoing research projects.

Tractarian Male Friendships, Intimacies, and Identities (forthcoming 2024 PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge)

This doctoral thesis examines the distinctive nature of Tractarian male friendships in nineteenth-century England and the impact of friendship on individual moral development and intellectual growth. Tractarian friendships explicitly embraced friendly intimacies as a mode of pastoral project—communicated and achieved through intense connexions and personal influence. As friends became more intensely associated, multiple Tractarian “affinities”, or groups of more intimately banded Tractarians, developed which represent distinctive strains in the development of Tractarian (and later Anglo-Catholic) thought. Consequently, a re-evaluation of Tractarianism through the lens of friendship disrupts the notion of a monolithic Tractarianism and removes the Oxford Movement from a St John Henry Newman-dominated narrative. Furthermore, by focussing on “intimacies”, this thesis highlights the significance of desire and affection within a pre-psychological era by restoring intense male friendship to a more historically sympathetic context. In summary, this thesis argues that Tractarian male friendships and intimacies were distinctive from contemporary nineteenth-century English male friendships, were consciously cultivated as a pastoral project, and played a vital role in the development of an intellectual Tractarian spectrum.