Bartholomew Ryan is an appointed research fellow at the NOVA Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA) at NOVA University Lisbon, where he is also a lecturer at the Department of Philosophy teaching a Masters course on ‘Art and Experience’ (with special emphasis on Ecological Thought in Philosophy and the Arts) and a Bachelor course on ‘Philosophy and Literature’. He was the first coordinator of CultureLab at IFILNOVA from 2017 to 2022; and coordinator of the research group ‘Forms of Life and Practices of Philosophy’ (2022–2025). He has been a member of various FCT funded exploratory projects over the years, the most recent being “Mapping Philosophy as a Way of Life: An Ancient Model, a Contemporary Approach” (2023–2025) and “Nietzsche on Nihilism and the Value of Art” (2018–2022). He is also a member of the Lisbon Nietzsche Group at IFILNOVA. He was a lecturer at Bard College Berlin (2007-2011), and has taught at universities in Brazil, India, Croatia, Denmark, Oxford, Dublin and Bishkek.
His academic and creative work orbits around the motif of ‘transformation’ and the plurality of the subject which takes into account the multiple realities and identities that can construe the modern human condition and ecological art of living. He continues to write on the tension between philosophy and literature, modernism as a philosophical problem, and theatre of the self, with special interest in figures such as Søren Kierkegaard, Fernando Pessoa, James Joyce, Friedrich Nietzsche, José de Almada Negreiros, and Roger Casement.
He is the author of Fernando Pessoa: Critical Lives (Reaktion Press 2024) and Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics: Interludes with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno (Brill 2014). His forthoming book is called James Joyce: The Unfolding Art of Flourishing and Decay, which will be published by Oxford University Press in the ‘Philoosphical Outsiders’ series (OUP 2027). He has also co-edited four books: Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us (Rowman & Littlefield 2021); Rostos do Si: Autobiografia, Confissão, Terapia (Vendaval 2019); Nietzsche e Pessoa: Ensaios (tinta-da-china 2016); and Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity (De Gruyter 2015).
In music, Bartholomew Ryan leads the dream-folk band The Loafing Heroes, so far releasing sixth albums; he also released a solo album called ‘Jabuti’ in 2022 under the name Loafing Hero; and is part of the experimental music project called Headfoot.
