Smiling man with a beard outdoors, wearing a light blue check shirt, in a green park setting.

English

William Murray

Assistant Professor of English

(423) 252-1366

wmurray@tnwesleyan.edu

Bio

After leaving Chattanooga in 2005, Dr. William Murray began a tour of the South: undergrad at the University of Mississippi, an MA at the College of Charleston and the Citadel, a PhD at the University of Alabama, then a Postdoc at Baylor University. At each of these institutions, he taught and studied literature. His research and teaching have largely focused on questions of race and region, and he remains deeply curious about how home and history shape the stories we tell about ourselves and others.

Coming to Tennessee Wesleyan, in many ways, is a return home. What he has found at this institution is a wonderful mix of brilliant students, caring faculty, and dedicated administrators.

Courses

  • ENG 101

    Composition I

  • ENG 102

    Composition II

  • ENG 201

    Masterpieces of World Literature I

  • ENG 202

    Masterpieces of World Literature II

  • ENG 241

    American Literature and Culture I: Beginnings to 1865

  • ENG 242

    American Literature and Culture II: 1865 – Present

  • ENG 243

    Multicultural American Literature

  • ENG 290

    Philosophy & Literature

  • ENG 260

    Cultural Diversity and Narrative Form

  • ENG 305

    English Internship

  • ENG 360

    The Short Story

  • ENG 405

    English Seminar

  • ENG 420

    Southern Literature

  • HON 101

    Problems/Promises of Citizenship

  • HON 390

    A Literature of Optimism

  • TWU 101

    First-Year Seminar

Publications

  • Dangerous Innocence: White Men, Mass Culture, and the Southern Outsider’s Appeal, 1960–2020. Louisiana State University Press, 2024.

  • “Already Underwater: Finding Hope in a Drowning Nation, Mat Johnson’s and Simon Gane’s Dark Rain.” The Mississippi Quarterly. Vol. 77, no. 3. 2025 (pgs.) 283-304.

  • (co-written with J. Haskell Murray) “Corporate Purpose and The Road” Transactions: Tennessee Journal of Business Law. Vol 25, Issue 2. Spring 2024. (pgs.) 424-441.

  • “Southern Cityscapes and George Saunders’ ‘CivilWarLand in Bad Decline’” Routledge Companion to the Literature of the U.S. South, edited by Monica Miller, et al., Routledge, 2022.

  • “Mystery and Myth: Friedrich Nietzsche, Flannery O’Connor, and the Limiting Power of Certainty” Reconsidering Flannery O’Connor, edited by Alison Arant, et al., University Press of Mississippi, 2020.

  • “‘A Night Already Devoid of Stars:’ Illuminating the Violent Darkness in Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner” American Studies. Vol 58 No 1. 2019. (pgs.) 25–47.

  • “The Roof of a Southern Home: A Reimagined and Usable South in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun” The Mississippi Quarterly. Vol. 68, no. 1/2, Winter/Spring 2015 (Published 2017): 277–293. (Reprinted) Twentieth-Century Literature Criticism. Ed. Carol A. Schwartz. Vol. 402. Prod. Layman Poupard. Detroit: Gale, Cengage, 2021. (pgs.) 148–155.

  • “Learning to Listen: The Way a Society Speaks in Eudora Welty’s ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’ and ‘The Demonstrators’.” Eudora Welty Review. 8.1 (2016). (pgs.) 109–122.

  • “Reimagining Terror in the Graphic Novel: Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner and the Cultural Imagination.” The College English Association Critic. 77 (2015): 329–338.

  • “The Men Who Don’t Remember: The Fort Sumter Monument and the Collective Forgetting of the Civil War.” The South Carolina Review. (2014): 177–187.

  • “A Vocabulary for New Conversations” Rev. of Keywords for Southern Studies. South a Scholarly Journal. Apr. 2017.

  • Contemporary Literary Criticism Series’ section on Harper Lee (Spring 2018)

  • State of the Field Essay for Society for the Study of Southern Literature Newsletter Volume 50, Issue 1, July 2016.