Jed Murr

Associate Teaching Professor

Associate Dean for Diversity and Equity

B.A. Philosophy and English, Northwest Missouri State University.
M.A. American Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Ph.D. English, University of Washington

Core Faculty Member: M.A. in Cultural Studies, American & Ethnic Studies
Affiliate Faculty Member: Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies

Office: UW1-345
Email: jmurr@uw.edu
Mailing Box: 358530, 18115 Campus Way NE, Bothell, WA 98011

Teaching

My teaching practice and collaborative work focus on finding and creating meaningful spaces of study, most often through collective attention to different expressive cultures, violences, and world-making projects that surround us. This pedagogy begins by honoring the experiences, embodied knowledges, histories, and questions that students carry with them when they enter the classroom, while also attending to the necessary limits of our own ways of knowing and being in the world. Together we take up interactive and immersive methods of inquiry in order to not just understand but to inhabit and perform particular perspectives and to articulate together the stakes of multidisciplinary work. In so doing, students in my class are asked to practice interdisciplinarity and ground our engagement–with race and gendered racialization, with material inequality and violence, and with creative cultural practices, cultural workers, social movements, and traditions of struggle–in relation to our own lives and our possible futures.

Recent Courses

BIS 490 Cultural Work and Social Change
BIS 379 American Ethnic Literatures
BCULST 593 Black Arts North/West
BIS/EDUC 255 Critical Diversity Studies
BIS 470 Art and Social Change
BISGST 497 International Study Abroad: Americans in Europe (Exile & Belonging)

Research and Public Engagement

My research on race and racialization in a global context, Black political and aesthetic movements, critical and international pedagogy, digital scholarship, and the politics of literary, popular, and visual cultures is situated in the tensions and connections between American Studies, Black Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, cultural studies, and related political and intellectual traditions. As a 2021-22 US Fulbright Scholar, I taught American Ethnic Literatures and lectured in a range of settings in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Much of my work includes direct collaborations with visual artists, writers, teachers, and other cultural workers to create sites of critical translation, study, and performance. In recent years, my writing and collaborations have been exhibited and presented in a range of venues, including the Jack Straw Gallery, The Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University, Seattle’s SOIL Gallery, the Seattle Public Library, and KUOW Radio, and my work has been supported by a UW Population Health Initiative Climate Change Planning Grant, a Fulbright US Scholar Award, two UW Bothell Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) Fellowship, a UW Bothell Scholarship, Research, and Creative Practice Seed Grant, two UW Bothell Community-Based Learning and Research Faculty Fellowships, and by an Early Career Faculty Scholarship for Black Publics in the Humanities at the Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching (HILT) Institute.