Bartholomew Ryan is a philosophy research fellow at the NOVA Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA) at NOVA University Lisbon, where he is also an invited lecturer at the Department of Philosophy teaching a Masters course on ‘Art and Experience’. He is currently the coordinator of the research group ‘Forms of Life and Practices of Philosophy’, and was coordinator of CultureLab at IFILNOVA from 2017 to 2022. He is also a member of ‘Philosophy and Literature’ and ‘Lisbon Nietzsche’ Research Groups at CultureLab. He is currently a team member of the FCT funded exploratory project “Mapping Philosophy as a Way of Life: An Ancient Model, a Contemporary Approach” (2023- ). He was a lecturer at Bard College Berlin (2007-2011), and has taught at universities in Brazil, Croatia, Oxford, Aarhus, Dublin and Bishkek.
His academic and creative work orbits around the motif of ‘transformation’ and plurality of the subject which takes into account the multiple realities and identities that can construe the modern human condition and ecological being. He continues to write on the tension between philosophy and literature, modernism as a philosophical problem, the theatre of the self, and the ecological art of living and dying, with special interest in figures such as Kierkegaard, Pessoa, Joyce, Nietzsche and Roger Casement. His next two books as author are: Fernando Pessoa: Critical Lives (Reaktion Press, 2024) and James Joyce: The Unfolding Art of Flourishing and Decay (OUP, 2025). He is also the author of Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics: Interludes with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno (Brill/Rodopi, 2014). He has also co-edited four books, the most recent being: Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us (with Antonio Cardiello and Giovanbattista Tusa, Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).
In 2022, Ryan released a solo album called ‘Jabuti’ under the name Loafing Hero; and he leads the international music project The Loafing Heroes, releasing their sixth album ‘meandertales’ in 2019; and is also part of the experimental music project called Headfoot.
