Murray, William

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Murray, William

Assistant Professor of English

(423) 252-1366

wmurray@tnwesleyan.edu

PUBLICATIONS

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

REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES & BOOK CHAPTERS

“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.

BOOK REVIEWS

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

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

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.

COURSES OFFERED

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)

BIOGRAPHY

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.