Professor Stuart Murray BA, MA, Exeter; DPhil, Waikato, NZ.
For a list of publications since 2001 click here
For a full list of publications click here
Research Interests
My research interests are varied and range across cultures and time periods. I was initially trained as a postcolonialist, with a specific focus on the literatures, film and cultural history surrounding the issues of postcolonial encounter and settlement, and wider interests in postcolonial writing more generally, especially from the Caribbean. More recently, my work has centred on cultural representations of disability, especially autism. My latest monographs are a contemporary cultural history of autism, Representing Autism: Culture Narrative, Fascination (Liverpool University Press, 2008), and a study of Maori filmmaker Barry Barclay, entitled Images of Dignity: Barry Barclay and Fourth Cinema (Huia Press, 2008). I have also recently co-edited two volumes on New Zealand cinema: New Zealand Filmmakers (Wayne State University Press, 2007) and Contemporary New Zealand Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2008). In terms of my work on film, I am also interested in all aspects of the filmic representation of disability on film, especially that from Hollywood.
I continue to be interested in both postcolonial and disability studies, and - under the combined heading of contemporary literature and film - still move between the two broad areas. My major postcolonial interests are in the field of Indigenous studies, particularly in relation to questions of protocols, permissions, sovereignty and visual representation. In terms of disability, my new book project looks at questions of disability, humanism and posthumanism, and covers literature, film and other media across the last two centuries. At the moment, I am very interested in the vast amount of disability representation to be found in American Southern Gothic writing, and have recently received funding to work on the Truman Capote papers held at the New York Public Library, especially in relation to his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. I sense that this project will involve a wide range of reading, from classic nineteenth-century humanist novels to 1950s and 60s science fiction.
I am bringing the my two major research interests together through editing, along with Clare Barker, a special issue of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies on disability and postcolonial cultures, which will appear in 2010.
I am the co-editor of Liverpool University Press’s book series ‘Representations: Health, Disability, Culture and Society’, and am happy to hear from anyone interested in submitting a proposal to the series. For more information on this, please see
http://www.liverpool-unipress.co.uk/html/categoryinfo.asp?idCategory=86.
I currently hold a University Teaching Fellowship from the University of Leeds, with a project that seeks to rethink issues of undergraduate assessment and learning outcomes within the frame of understanding the range of cognitive difference in students. For more on this project, please see
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/sddu/lt/fellowship/2008_09/s_murray.html
I am on the editorial boards of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability, Studies the Journal of New Zealand Literature, Studies in Australasian Cinema, and Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings. I am a member of the AHRC Peer Review College for the 2007-2010 session.
In the past, I have supervised PhD research into a number of postcolonial and disability topics. These include: contemporary Maori writing, the Journals of eighteenth-century Pacific exploration, the use of travel narratives in contemporary Caribbean writing, the work of Janet Frame, the representation of the Pacific in nineteenth-century fiction and ethnography, the representation of disabled and exceptional children in contemporary postcolonial writing, and the use of medievalism in post 1945 writing from Australia. Currently, I am supervising theses on Indigenous writing in Australia from 1998 to the present, and cross-culturalism in the work of Wilson Harris. I would welcome interest or enquiries from potential research students thinking of working on any issue connected to Australian or New Zealand writing or film, especially in connection to Indigenous cultural practice, or any aspect of disability representation.
Recent Activity
In July 2009 I gave a keynote paper, entitled ‘Virginia’s Sister: Identity, Metaphor and the Persistence of Disability’ at the ‘Identity and Form in Contemporary Literature’ conference held at Sheffield Hallam University.
In June 2009, along with Clare Barker, I gave a keynote presentation entitled ‘Postcolonial Literatures and the Materiality of Disability’ in the seminar series ‘Literary, Cultural & Disability Studies: A Tripartite Approach to Postcolonialism’, held at the Centre for Disability Research at Lancaster University.
In December 2008, I gave an invited paper entitled ‘The Function of Autism: Representations and Invitations’, to the Autism Spectrum People and Religion Research Group meeting at the University of Birmingham.
In November 2008, I gave a paper entitled ‘Said, Humanism and Disability: Participatory Citizenship and Radical Democratic Criticism’ at the ‘Orientalism: 30 Years Later’ conference, held in Department of English and Related Literatures at the University of York.
In September 2008 I was an invited guest panellist at the special ‘Autism and the Media’ session of the National Autistic Society International conference, ‘Research into Practice’. The session was chaired by NAS President Jane Asher and included filmmakers, writers and executives from Channel 4 and the BBC.
In July 2008 I was an invited guest critic at Era New Horizons International Film Festival, in Wroclaw, Poland. This was the largest ever festival of New Zealand Cinema, and I introduced and led discussion on a number of New Zealand feature films.
Teaching
Undergraduate
Cultures
of Settlement: Place and Postcoloniality in Australia and New Zealand
States
of Mind: Disability, Cognitive Impairment and Exceptionality in Contemporary
Culture
Postgraduate
Postcolonial
Cultures of Encounter & Settlement
Leeds Postcolonial Research Group
Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies
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