Ryan McDermott is associate professor of medieval literature and culture. He earned his Ph.D. in English from University of Virginia after completing an M.T.S. at Duke Divinity School. His first book, Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350-1600 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), tracks changes and continuities in vernacular religious literature across the intellectual and cultural watershed of the English Reformation. Ryan directs the cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional project Genealogies of Modernity, and is working on a second book, Genealogies: How to Think about the Past and the Future in the Humanities.