Mitch R. Murray is a Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Media. He specializes in contemporary literature, science fiction, multiethnic literatures of the United States and Canada, and comics studies. His teaching focuses on how the creative practices of reading and writing make us better interpreters and creators of our shared social reality.

Murray’s recent publications include the collection William Gibson and the Futures of Contemporary Culture, co-edited with Mathias Nilges, for the University of Iowa Press’s New American Canon series. Gathering leading scholars, plus breakout sci-fi authors Charles Yu and Malka Older, their book demonstrates Gibson’s profound impact on literature, culture, and media of the past 40 years. Murray’s other work appears in field-defining journals like ASAP/Journal, College Literature, Post45 Contemporaries, and Science Fiction Film & Television. His public facing scholarship on contemporary literature and culture, science fiction, and utopia also appears in popular venues like ASAP/J (where he is a contributing editor), Public Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books. 

He is currently working on a monograph titled The Science Fictional Art, which explores how science fiction has dovetailed with the novelistic category of the artist novel to produce a new form of utopian literature. He is also working on an edited book provisionally titled Teaching Twenty-First Century Literature. For those who teach very recent literature, there is no standard canon or methodology. Making a case for teaching as a too-long undervalued form of scholarly productivity, Murray and the contributors to this volume offer a practical handbook for teaching what they argue are key literary texts of the twenty-first century.

Before joining Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Murray was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English at Emory University, where he participated in the Mellon Humanities Pathways Program to develop courses centered on climate change and public communication.

Originally from Nova Scotia, Canada, Murray earned his B.A. with First Class Honors at St. Francis Xavier University and his Ph.D. in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Florida, where he was awarded a Graduate School Fellowship and a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.