Rob Ryder entered the program in 2001 as a student of Comparative Literature and German. He earned his B.A. with a double major in Music and Comparative Literature from the University of Alberta in Canada, and went on to receive his M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Western Ontario in 2000. He has also studied at the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna and the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg. His research interests include music and literature, German critical thought and early German film. Presently he is working on the spatial and temporal ramifications of Walter Benjamin‚s notion of Schwelle, and the extent to which it might affect or reflect theoretical problems of acoustics and sound theory from Deleuze‚s refrain to Michel Chion‚s acousmetre. His dissertation will focus on acoustics and the uncanny in early twentieth-century German literature and film.