Marie-Laure Ryan is a prominent literary critic and scholar-in-residence at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has published several books and articles about narrative theory, fiction, virtual worlds, and digital media. Ryan received numerous international fellowships, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a fellowship of the Cornell Society for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Furthermore, she won the Modern Language Association (MLA) Prize for Independent Scholars, as well as the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies of the MLA.