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Daniel Ryan Morse, Ph.D.

Director, Core Humanities; Associate Professor of English
Daniel Morse

Summary

Daniel Ryan Morse specializes in 20th century and contemporary British and global Anglophone literature, with additional interests in radio studies, transnational modernisms, media studies, critical theory, disability studies and sound studies. After earning his B.A. from the George Washington University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Temple University, Morse taught at the University of Delaware before joining the ÍƼöÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ faculty in 2015.

Morse is the author of (Columbia, 2020). The book, published in the Modernist Latitudes series, demonstrates the significance of the Eastern Service for global Anglophone literature and literary broadcasting. It traces how modernist writers used radio to experiment with form and introduce postcolonial literature to global audiences. While innovative authors consciously sought to incorporate radio’s formal features into the novel, literature also exerted a reciprocal and profound influence on 20th century broadcasting. Reading Joyce and Forster alongside Attia Hosain, Mulk Raj Anand, and Venu Chitale, Morse demonstrates how the need to appeal to listeners at the edges of the empire pushed the boundaries of literary work in London, inspired high-cultural broadcasting in England and formed an invisible but influential global network.

At the ÍƼöÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, Morse teaches courses on global modernism, the history and future(s) of the book, and troubled youth in Ireland. He has won a number of teaching awards, including the English Graduate Organization’s prize for Best Graduate Mentor (in 2017 and again in 2019) and the Fitzgerald Distinguished Professor of the Humanities (2019-21). Morse is also a contributing writer to Tape Op: The Creative Music Recording Magazine.]

Research interests

  • British literature after 1800
  • Modernist studies
  • Comparative literature
  • Postcolonialism
  • Film and media studies
  • Literary theory

Selected publications

Book

  • Radio Empire: The BBC’s Eastern Service and the Emergence of the Global Anglophone Novel, Columbia University Press, 2020.

Peer-Reviewed Articles & Book Chapters

  • “Dylan Thomas at the Microphone: The BBC’s Book of Verse and Imperial Cultural Propaganda.” British Writing, Propaganda and Cultural Diplomacy in the Second World War and Beyond, ed. Beatriz Lopez, James Smith & Guy Woodward. Bloomsbury, 2024. 48-62.
  • “Voices from the Global Marketplace: Radio Drama, Neoliberalism, and the BBC in Nigeria.” The Global South2 (2022): 117-134.
  • “Egypt, Orientalism, and the BBC World Service, 1952-2013.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television3 (2019): 553-567.
  • "Sounding Dismodernism in James Joyce's Ulysses." Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 4 (2018): 459-475.
  • "An ‘Impatient Modernist:' Mulk Raj Anand at the BBC." Modernist Cultures1 (Spring 2015): 83-98. 

Notable exhibition

  • In the summer of 2013, Morse curated an exhibition on James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) for the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Courses taught

  • Sounding the Global Anglophone Novel
  • Contemporary British Literature
  • Teenage Wasteland: the “Problem” of Youth in Ireland
  • The Novel after Ulysses
  • Global Modernism, the Archive, and Theories of Totality
  • The History and Future(s) of the Book
  • Queer Modernism: Twentieth-Century British Fiction

Education

  • D. (with distinction), English, Temple University, 2014
  • A., English, Temple University, 2009
  • A., English, George Washington University, 2004