My name is Ben Murphy, and I’m a Lecturer in the English Department at Elon University (Elon, NC), where I also serve as affiliate faculty in the African and African-American Studies (AAASE) program.

At Elon, I teach classes in Writing, African American and American Literature, Genre Fiction, Digital Humanities, and Medical Humanities. I am also the Faculty Advisor for the Liberal Arts Forum, a student-run academic club responsible for bringing high-profile guest speakers to campus. Broadly speaking, my academic 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 and multiethnic literature in relation to the history of so-called “racial science.”

My first book project, The Mass Racial Imaginary: Crowding the Color Line in 19^th-Century American Literature, centers on the racial politics and aesthetics of crowds and crowd violence. Primarily, I analyze literature written by Black and White American authors whose work spans the early 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 contribute to the Red Record Project, a collaborative website housed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that is working to document and map lynchings that occurred in the area of the former Confederacy.

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

• American Literature
• Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and the Arts
• 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. Most recently, 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