Associate Professor, English
E-mail address: meg.mcgavran.murray@gmail.com
Meg McGavran Murray joined the MSU faculty in 1976. She holds a B.A. and M.A. from Ohio State University and a Ph.D. from Cornell University, where she was a student of Romantics scholar Meyer Abrams and American Intellectual Historian Cushing Strout. At Mississippi State she taught primarily in the area of the American Romantics. During her tenure at MSU she served as the first chairperson of Women's Studies and was instrumental in setting up the Women's Studies Program. At MSU she also served as President of the Northeast Mississippi Graduate Association of Phi Beta Kappa, as President of the Mississippi State chapter of the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, and as Director of the Women's Studies Program. She has published in American Literature and elsewhere. Sponsored by a Mellon Grant, she was a Radcliffe Research Scholar during the academic year 1981-82, and in 1983 she was editor of Face to Face: Fathers, Mothers, Masters, Monsters--Essays for a Nonsexist Future, a volume with a foreword by Florence Howe and essays by herself and noted authors such as Christopher Lasch, Jessie Bernard, Jean Baker Miller, and Dorothy Dinnerstein. Her book, Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim, a biography of the controversial writer of the United States' first feminist manifesto, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2008. Recently retired, she is working on a biography of New Deal pioneer Clara Mortenson Beyer, who was Associate Director of the Bureau of Labor Standards during FDR's administration. Murray's daughter, Allie Murray Sargent (Harvard '04), is writing a Ph.D. dissertation at Yale in the Departments of Cultural Anthropology and American Studies on narrative and loss among older homeless women.
