Patricia Murray
Patricia Murray is an associate fellow at The Institute for the Study of the Americas [ISA] London University. She was previously Senior Lecturer in English and Director of the MA in Postcolonial Cultures at London Metropolitan University. Her teaching specialisms include British and US fiction as well as Caribbean, Latin American and Postcolonial literatures. She has supervised MPhil/PhD students in a range of pan-Caribbean literature, Irish and African literature, Black British writing and creative writing.
Dr. Murray holds a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford, an MA in Comparative Literary Theory and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on literature of the wider Caribbean (including the work of Gabriel García Márquez, Wilson Harris, Lawrence Scott and Erna Brodber) and related debates in cultural history and theory, particularly discourses of myth, science and religion, indigeneity and creolisation. She has travelled widely in Latin America and the Caribbean and has carried out field-work with indigenous communities in Guyana and Dominica.
Dr. Murray is committed to developing comparative approaches to Caribbean and Postcolonial literature and foregrounding the importance of literature and the arts in the struggle for political emancipation. She has organised various conferences and research seminars in this area and presented research papers at conferences in the Caribbean, US and Europe. She is currently co-ordinating a research project to investigate the literary forms of magical realism in the wider Caribbean and is completing a book length study on the work of Wilson Harris and García Márquez.
Recent Publications include:
‘The Marvellous and the Real in Pauline Melville’s The Migration of
Ghosts’ in eds. Lucy Evans, Mark McWatt and Emma Smith, The
Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives (Leeds: Peepal Tree
Press, forthcoming 2011);
'A Caribbean and Universal Self: Wilson Harris as "Warrior of the
Imaginary"' in eds. K. Gyssels and B. Ledent, The Caribbean Writer
as Warrior of the Imaginary/ L’Ecrivain Caribéen, guerrier de
l’imaginaire (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2008)
pp.189-202;
'Writing Trinidad: Nation and Hybridity in The Dragon Can't Dance
and Witchbroom' in ed. Bill Schwarz, Caribbean Literature After
Independence: The Case of Earl Lovelace (London: University of
London ISA Press, 2008) pp.94-110;
'Constructing Postcoloniality: Scientific Enquiries in Cien años de
soledad ' in eds. E. Fishburn and E. Ortiz, Science and the
Creative Imagination in Latin America (London: University of London
ISA Press, 2005) pp.151-174.
