My name is Ben Murphy, and I’m an Assistant Teaching Professor in the English Department at Elon University (Elon, NC), where I also serve on the faculty advisory committee for the African and African-American Studies at Elon (AAASE) program.

At Elon, I teach classes in African American Literature, Black Studies, Genre Fiction, and First-Year Writing. For instance, I’ve recently taught:

• ENG 1237: Zombie Fiction & Film – Course I designed on zombie media spanning Black Atlantic colonial origins to global apocalypse blockbusters and video games.
• ENG 1718: Black Speculative Fiction – Course I designed on Black-authored genre texts from written and visual traditions that experiment with sci fi, horror, and fantasy.
• ENG 2250: African American Literature Before 1945 – Part 1 of historical survey.
• ENG 2260: African American Literature After 1945 – Part 2 historical survey.
• ENG 3300: The Harlem Renaissance – Upper-level seminar on arts and culture of “The Negro Renaissance.”
• ENG 3590: African American Novels – Upper-level seminar on the novel form in African American writing.

For these literature-based courses, I often draw on additional interdisciplinary methods related to American Studies, Film Studies, and Art History.

Recently, I have also been teaching a travel abroad course, “Spain — Art & Revolt,” that travels with ~30 students to Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao each Winter Term to introduce students to the landscape of political art in the Spanish tradition.

Additionally at Elon, I am also the Faculty Advisor for the Liberal Arts Forum, a student-run academic club responsible for inviting and hosting guest speakers on campus. Some recent guests include Ocean Vuong (poet and novelist); Mac Stone (conservationist photographer); Jonathan Eig (biographer); Alexi Pappas (track-and-field Olympian; filmmaker; actor).

My research focuses on U.S. literature, race, region, and science in the long 19th century (circa 1800 -1930). In particular, I focus on African American literature and culture in relation to the history of so-called “racial science.” Increasingly, I also work on more contemporaries stories and films in the Black speculative fiction tradition–texts by Black authors that suspend rules of reality to experiment with horror, science fiction, and fantasy tropes.

My book project, The Mass Racial Imaginary: Crowding the Color Line in U.S. Literature, centers on the racial politics and aesthetics of crowds and crowd violence. Primarily, I analyze literature written by U.S. authors from the mid 19th century to the early 20th century. Considering novels, stories, and essays in tandem with scientific discourse, I look at how writers attempted to represent and make sense of crowd and mob behavior, especially as this behavior was filtered through discourses of race and racism. This project has been supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, as well as several other competitive fellowships and awards. It also won two annual dissertation awards from UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of English. You can read more about it on my Research Page.

Related to this project, I also contributed to the Red Record Project, a collaborative website housed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill documents and map lynchings that occurred in the area of the former Confederacy.

My peer-reviewed articles are published or forthcoming in several journals, including:

• American Literature
• Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and the Arts
• Studies in American Fiction
• Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures

Additional writing, including essays, reviews, and interviews, appears with: ASAP/J; boundary2o; The Carolina Quarterly; Chicago Review of Books; Full Stop; Gulf Coast; The Millions; Pedagogy and American Literary Study (PALS); PopMatters; symploke. For links to all the above work, see my Writing Page.

I completed by Ph.D. at UNC-Chapel Hill, and during my graduate training there, I regularly taught undergraduate courses in literature, film, the Medical Humanities, and Writing & Composition. In total, I was the instructor of record for a dozen undergraduate courses. I also served as a Teaching Assistant, a Research Consultant, and a tutor in various capacities. Due to all this work in the classroom, I was fortunate to receive three major teaching awards, including the Tanner Award for Excellence in Teaching, the highest recognition available to graduate instructors at UNC-Chapel Hill.

I have also served in several editorial positions. For instance, I was an editorial assistant for American Literature, published by Duke University Press. Before that, I spent several years as Book Reviews editor for The Carolina Quarterly (out of UNC). And while an undergraduate, I was the editor-in-chief of my college’s literary magazine, The Lanthorn, out of Houghton College (Houghton, NY).  

This is my dog, who is lazy but, as you can clearly see, also quite delightful.

Contact Ben