Dr. Ryn's areas of research and teaching include the history of Western political thought, ethics and politics, politics and the imagination, historicism, the theory of knowledge, conservatism, American political thought, and constitutionalism. He has taught also at the University of Virginia, Georgetown University, and Louisiana State University. The recipient of many awards and grants, Professor Ryn was named Outstanding Graduate Professor by the CUA Graduate Student Association in 1992. In 2011 he received the CUA faculty award for Distinguished Achievement in Research. His many books include A Common Human Ground, America the Virtuous, Will, Imagination and Reason, and Democracy and the Ethical Life. He has published and lectured widely on both sides of the Atlantic and in China. In 2000 he gave the Distinguished Foreign Scholar Lectures at Beijing University, which published this series as a book, Unity Through Diversity (in Chinese translation). Three of Ryn's books and many of his other writings have appeared in Chinese translation. In 2012 Beijing Normal University named him Honorary Professor. Ryn is editor of Humanitas and chairman of the National Humanities Institute (NHI). He served as president of the Philadelphia Society and is President of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters. He was chairman of the Department from 1979 to 1985.