Mitch R. Murray is a Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Media. He specializes in contemporary literature and speculative fiction.

His edited volume Teaching Twenty-First Century Literature: Essays from the Classroom is under contract with the University of Iowa Press. Assembling 34 expert teacher-scholars from across the globe, this first-of-its-kind guide offers provocative critical essays in the service of literature pedagogy.

Murray’s recent publications include the collection William Gibson and the Futures of Contemporary Culture, co-edited with Mathias Nilges, and essays in  ASAP/Journal, College Literature, Cultural Critique, Public Books, Science Fiction Film & Television, and the volume Teaching Science Fiction. He hosts Less Worse, an academic podcast about the dystopian state of the present and our collective prospects for a less worse, more utopian future.

Murray is also conducting research for a monograph titled Universe Makers: Utopianism and US Science Fiction after 1938. This project tells a new history of American SF since 1938. Using unique archival discoveries, my project traces the origins of this popular genre to a forgotten cohort of fans and amateur writers who built the American SF publishing industry in the inter- and postwar periods. These publishing workers saw SF as a democratic, anti-fascist, utopian political program. But today, SF has been co-opted by far-right extremists as a tool to imagine, narrate, and assert their domination over the future. The book recovers a neglected history of SF to argue that its lost utopian aspirations for a democratic, egalitarian future matter now more than ever.

Before joining Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Murray was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English at Emory University. Originally from Nova Scotia, Canada, Murray earned his BA with First Class Honors at St. Francis Xavier University and his PhD in English at the University of Florida, where he was awarded a Graduate School Fellowship and a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.