Professor Laura Murray
PhD Cornell
On leave January–June 2012
Contact Information
Office: Watson 534
Office Hours: Thurs. 1:30–3:00
Extension: 74438
E-mail: laura.murray@queensu.ca
Research Interests
Primary: Copyright law and theory; American literature, media, and popular culture, especially before the Civil War; history of the book and the newspaper; history of reading. Secondary: Literature of exploration and colonization; Indigenous literature and culture.
Recent Publications
- “Copyright and Communication Rights in Canada,” Media Divides: Communication Rights and the Right to Communicate in Canada, ed. Marc Raboy and Jeremy Shtern (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010) 196–218.
- “Reproductive Technologies: Flesh, Paint, Text,” No More Potlucks no. 4, June 2009 <http://www.nomorepotlucks.org/article/copie-no4/reproductive-technologies-flesh-paint-text>
- “See you in Court: Can Canadians Practice Parody?” with Craig Berggold, FUSE Magazine 32.2, March 2009: 12–17.
- Rev. of RiP: A Remix Manifesto, by Brett Gaylor, Culture Machine June 2009 <http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/372>.
- Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide, with Sam Trosow (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2007).
- “Copyright Talk: Patterns and Pitfalls in Canadian Policy Discourses,” In the Public Interest: The Future of Canadian Copyright Law, ed. Michael Geist (Toronto: Irwin, 2005).
Remarks
Professor Murray has enjoyed being one of the pioneers of the new first year undergrad course, ENGL100, which she looks forward to continuing to develop further over the coming years. Highlights the first time through were Langston Hughes, William Blake, Judith Thompson (her play set in Kingston, The Crack Walker), Othello, Elizabeth Bishop, Jonathan Safran Foer, Emily Dickinson, Eden Robinson, and eloquent guest lectures from several colleagues and local poets. During her leave in Winter 2012, Professor Murray will be a Visiting Scholar at Media@McGill, completing a book (with Tina Piper and Kirsty Robertson) to be titled Putting Intellectual Property in its Place: Rights Discourses, Creative Labour, and the Everyday, and preparing a second edition of Canadian Copyright: A Citizen's Guide. A project on the changing iconography of the newspaper in US from the eighteenth-century on is in the early stages of gestation. Professor Murray's research methods include interviewing, archival work, and internet browsing as well as literary reading and rereading; theoretically she is engaged at present with ideas of alienated and affective labour as they pertain to artistic production today; theories of community and creativity as inflected by medium, gender, and place; theories of reading; and (always!) theories of ideology.
Professor Murray is interested in supervising graduate students in English or Cultural Studies with aspirations to rigorous interdisciplinarity, whether working in nineteenth-century US contexts, twentieth-century Indigenous or immigrant literatures, or present-day policy and theory. If you have thoughts of reading court cases through Bakhtin or talking about poetry to a parliamentary committee, you might like working with her. Over the years, she has been lucky to be able to hire research assistants from Law, Psychology, and Cultural Studies in addition to English, and the tutorial structure of ENGL100 has provided a welcome opportunity to work in a teaching team with graduate students.
Joyce Tracy Fellow, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester Massachusetts, summer 2010; Fulbright Visiting Research Chair, Law & Society, New York University, 2006–7; Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies, Kwansei Gakuin University, Nishinomiya, Japan, 2003–4. Editorial Board, Early American Literature. W. J. Barnes Teaching Excellence Award, 2002–3. Founder and author, www.faircopyright.ca, 2003-2010. Editor, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751–1776 (U of Massachusetts P, 1998); co-editor with Keren Rice, Talking on the Page: Editing Aboriginal Oral Texts (U of Toronto P, 1999).