Dr Ryan Sweet is a cultural and literary historian of disability with a passion for inclusive practice and widening participation in Higher Education. Ryan has published extensively on the ways in which prosthetic body parts were imagined and represented in Victorian literature and culture. He is also interested in tabletop gaming and human-animal relations in literature.
Ryan's most notable publication to date is his Open Access monograph , which was published in the prestigious Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture book series in 2022.
Thanks to generous funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, in collaboration with the serious games company Focus Games Ltd., Ryan developed the research from his book into a board game called , which was taken to market in 2025.
Alongside his research and creative work, Ryan is an award-winning teacher in Higher Education, having won an Excellence in Learning and Teaching Award at Swansea in 2021.
Qualifications
Ryan rejoined the ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ in April 2025 after five years of leading the Humanities Foundation Year at Swansea University, where he was Senior Lecturer in Humanities. He was previously the inaugural Programme Director of Plymouth's Foundation Years in English Literature, English Literature and Creative Writing, and History (2018-20).
Ryan has taught across the humanities at all HE levels since 2013. In addition to Plymouth and Swansea, he previously taught at the University of Exeter and Bath Spa University. He also held a Wellcome Trust Early Career Research Fellowship at the University of Leeds in 2017-2018.
A first-generation university student from rural working-class mid-Cornwall, Ryan completed his BA (hons), MA, and PhD with Exeter from 2008 to 2016.
Professional membership
Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Advance HE
Fellow of the Royal Historical Society