Douglas Murray
Douglas Murray believes that English majors are born rather
than made. He dates his love of reading (and his Anglophilia) from
early happy experiences with Agatha Christie novels, Jane Eyre, and
du Maurier's Rebecca. He gravitates toward British rather
than American literature and feels most at home with works of the
17th-early 20th centuries. His favorite novelist is Jane Austen,
whose works he has helped edit for the Oxford University Press.
Favorite poets include Pope, Blake, and Hopkins. His missions
include teaching readers to feel poetry in their bones and to
expand their reading beyond works penned in the last 15 minutes.
He teaches First-Year Writing (a nice course focusing on romances
and other sorts of reading cults); Surveys of British Literature on
the undergraduate and graduate level; and advanced courses on the
18th century and the British novel. He also teaches a seminar in
the First-Year Gen Ed program entitled 'Knowing When to
Laugh: The Epistemology of Humor.'
He firmly believes in the value of foreign language study, and at
an advanced age learned to speak passable French. He was made an
honorary member of Phi Sigma Iota, Belmont's foreign
language society.
He is also a musician, serving as organist at the
Nashville's First Presbyterian Church, at Franklin and
Tyne. His specialties include improvisation in the French style and
all music associated with the Church of England.
email:
Doug Murray
phone: 615.460.6861
office: WHB 213B
