Projects per year
Personal profile
Research interests
My research focuses on modernist and twentieth-century literature, animal studies, and the environment.
My first book, The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), argued for the importance of insects to modernism's formal innovations, its engagement with key socio-political concerns, as well as its questioning of the boundaries of the human. Focusing on the prose writing of Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, H.D., and Samuel Beckett, I uncovered a shared fascination with the aesthetic possibilities of the insect body – its adaptive powers, distinct stages of growth, and swarming formations.
My current research project, Marine Attachments, examines aesthetic and affective responses to marine life in modern and contemporary poetry. Focusing on the writing of T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, and Kamau Brathwaite, along with contemporary ecopoetry, I'm exploring how writers challenge mainstream cultural attitudes towards marine life and uncover new ways of relating to distant and seemingly ‘alien’ entities. I'm also considering what the idea of attachment – approached from various disciplinary angles – can bring to environmental thought.
I am currently editing a book collection with Vera Fibisan entitled Blue Extinction in Literature, Art, and Culture (Palgrave, 2025), which focuses on representations of aquatic biodiversity loss from the early-modern period to the present. With Caroline Hovanec, I am the editor of a cluster of open-access essays for Modernism/modernity entitled Reading Modernism in the Sixth Extinction.
Other research interests include literature and psychoanalysis, affect theory, queer studies, and literature and science.
I would be delighted to hear from postgraduate research students interested in twentieth-century literature and/or modernism; animal studies; the blue humanities; extinction studies; literature and science; the environmental humanities.
Teaching
I currently teach on the following units:
Literature and the Environment: Diverse Perspectives (MA)
Themes in Environmental Humanities (MA)
Animal Planet (MA)
Writing in the Elements: Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Uranium (MA)
Modernist, Experimentation and Form (MA)
Transformations
Approaches to Poetry
Keywords
- Modernism
- Animal Studies
- Environment
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Projects
- 1 Finished
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LITTLE THINGS RULE THE WORLD: THE ENLIVENING PRACTICES OF APICULTURE AND HAND-MADE FILMMAKING
Patchett, M. M., Murray, R. & Smith, V.
3/01/18 → 31/07/18
Project: Research
Research output
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Colds and Carbuncles: Review of Peter Fifield, Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books
Murray, R., 18 Oct 2022, In: Women: A Cultural Review. 33, 3, p. 344 347 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Review article (Academic Journal) › peer-review
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Reading Modernism in the Sixth Extinction
Murray, R. & Hovanec, C., 7 Oct 2022, In: Modernism/Modernity.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article (Academic Journal) › peer-review
Open Access -
Things that Cling: Marine Attachments in Eliot
Murray, R., 23 Jul 2022, In: Journal of Modern Literature. p. 21-38 17 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article (Academic Journal) › peer-review
Activities
- 1 Visiting an external academic institution
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University of London
Rachel Murray (Visiting researcher)
8 Jul 2023 → 15 Jul 2023Activity: Visiting an external institution types › Visiting an external academic institution