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.
