M. Stephanie Murray

Senior Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Initiatives & Teaching Professor, BXA Intercollege Degree Programs

Bio

M. Stephanie Murray has directed the BXA Intercollege Degree Programs since 2011. She also teaches the BXA Seminar I for first-year students and BXA Seminar II for transfer students; both classes address representation as a mode of knowledge across disciplines. These seminars consider visual art, graphic novels, podcasts, videos, films, maps and other creative expressions through the lens of critical and aesthetic theory.

Murray also co-teaches the BXA Capstone Seminars, where she helps guide BXA students through their research toward their senior projects, as well as reminding them why failure is an important research method.

From her background in Early Modern English drama, Murray has expanded her research interests to address ekphrasis and visual representation in text, strategies of epistemology and narrative, and how specialized vocabularies help frame individual experience. She’s currently working on an article about reading, color and the body as text in Shakespeare’s Lucrece and drafting her manifesto for an imaginary Institute of Weird Studies.

Murray earned her Ph.D. in literature and her M.A. in humanities at the University of Chicago, and did her undergraduate work at the University of Arizona.