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. In 2023, he also co-edited a special double issue of College Literature, “Genres of Empire,” which accounts for anticolonial politics of contemporary genre fiction by multiethnic, Indigenous, and global Anglophone authors. His public facing scholarship on contemporary literature, science fiction, and utopia also appears in popular venues like Public Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books. 

He is currently working on a monograph titled The Art of Genre, 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 interested in the literary and cultural afterlife of the 1980s and 1990s and is working on a comprehensive edited book on the oeuvre of groundbreaking science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson.

Before joining Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English and Writing Program at Emory University. There, he taught science fiction, multiethnic literature, environmental literature, and composition. At Emory, 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.