Professor Ruland has offered courses in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century writers and movements at several universities in the United States, England and The Netherlands; he has lived and lectured frequently abroad on Bruern, Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships. His essays range from Tocqueville, Melville and Hawthorne to Henry James, Kafka and Brecht, from the legacy of Pragmatism and Anglo-American literary influence to the history, theory and methods of literary study in the United States. His interest in cultural nationalism and the history of taste led him to edit two collections of theories of American Literature: The Native Muse (1972, 1976) and A Storied Land (1976). He is the author of The Rediscovery of American Literature, Premises of Critical Taste, 1900-1940 (1967); America in Modern European Literature: From Image to Metaphor (1976); and, with British novelist and critic Malcolm Bradbury, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature (1991, 1992), which has been translated into Czech and Hungarian (1997).