Ryan Leack

Dr. Ryan David Leack is Assistant Professor of Writing in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California, and received his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Riverside, where under the mentorship of Vorris Nunley, Steven Axelrod, and Fred Moten he studied the productive intersections between rhetorical listening, quantum mechanics, philosophy, composition, and poetry. In particular, he studies the coalescing historical and conceptual developments between rhetoric and physics, their implications for writing and rhetoric, and the impact of artificial intelligence on writing and thinking writ large.

His academic work has appeared in the edited collection Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies, and in the journal Composition Forum. His public intellectual work on writing, thinking, and artificial intelligence has appeared in The Conversation, The Fulcrum, and numerous other journals. His creative work has appeared in journals such as Chiron Review, Poetry Quarterly, Tipton Poetry Journal, Pif, Westwind, RipRap, Contemporary World Literature, Strong Verse, and Pomona Valley Review, for which he served as Editor-in-Chief for seven years. Such poetry has come together in his debut poetry book, Totality & Temporality: Elegies through Time and Space (Finishing Line Press, 2026).

Ryan’s instrumental music, which grounds his resonant approach to rhetoric through the ear (aurality) vs. the mouth (orality), is available on Apple Music, Spotify, and like services. His music, consisting of 55 solo instrumental tracks, has also been featured in films available at or on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Walmart, Target, and like services and retailers internationally, including Getty Music, in addition to films and TV shows on CBS, CNN, HBO, Showtime, and other channels, and has been played on radio stations in 50+ countries.

In 2025, Ryan embarked on a multivolume book project, for which he has over 1,000 pages, that explores exhaustion as a prominent feature of modern life and what we can do about it. Here, he brings his study of and experiences with numerous disciplines, including rhetoric and music, to bear upon the question of how we find peace and rest in an exhausting world. Such scholarly work is supported by his co-hosting of the Dornsife Writing Program podcast Live Theory: Living Writing & Rhetoric, where he interviews scholars from diverse traditions, and for which he designs and maintains the website and audio production. Though intensively engaged with such activities, Ryan enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter, especially on afternoon bike rides.

• Ph.D. English, University of California, Riverside, 2018
• MA English, Cal Poly Pomona, 2012
• BA English, Cal State Long Beach, 2008