Jillmarie Murphy
My teaching and research interests encompass the fields of American and trans-Atlantic literature from the 17th through the early-20th century. My publications primarily employ the psychosocial paradigm of attachment theory, drawing on topics considering parenting, gender, race, class, and ethnicity and their relationship to human-to-human, human-to-place, and human-to-animal bonding in literature.
Education
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PhD in English and American Literature, University @ Albany
Areas of Research / Professional Expertise
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Broadly conceived, my teaching and research interests encompass the field of American literature from the seventeenth through the early twentieth century. I teach courses and have published books, journal articles, and essays that focus on Puritan poetics, literature of the early American Republic, prominent and lesser-known antebellum literary figures, trans-Atlantic writers who span the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and American realist and naturalist novels. Within this rather extensive time frame, my research interests and publications primarily employ the psycho-social paradigm of attachment theory, drawing on topics considering parenting, gender, race, class, and ethnicity and their relationship to human-to-human, human-to-place, and human-to-animal bonding in literature. I also have several publications that engage archival research and provide a lens through which to consider the evolution of literary history and how certain authors and/or texts resonate long after their heyday.
Books
Articles
The Politics of Place Attachment and the Laboring Body in Thomas Hardy’s Tess
Published: Oct 23, 2017 by Victorian Ecocriticism: The Politics of Place and Early Environmental Justice
Authors: Jillmarie Murphy
Subjects:
Literature, Gender & Sexuality, Gender & Intersectionality Studies
Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented (1891) employs the politics of place attachment to challenge the gendered rhetoric of Victorian England borne out in organizations like the Girls’ Friendly Society, which essentially politicized female bodies by imposing strict sexual mores on poor, working-class women.
The Humming Bird, or Herald of Taste (1798): Periodical Culture & Female Editors
Published: May 30, 2016 by American Periodicals
Authors: Jillmarie Murphy
Subjects:
History, Literature, Gender & Sexuality, Gender & Intersectionality Studies
Published in 1798, the Humming Bird; or Herald of Taste is the first American magazine known to be edited by a woman. This essay discusses the important role the Humming Bird plays in the history of women editors, as well as editorial practices in early Republican print culture and the professionalization of the early American magazine.
“Chains of Emancipation: Place Attachment in Dunbar's Sport of the Gods
Published: Mar 01, 2014 by Studies in American Naturalism
Authors: Jillmarie Murphy
Subjects:
Literature, Social Psychology, Urban Studies, Gender & Intersectionality Studies
Sport of the Gods focuses on various attachment issues that are amplified for African Americans as a consequence of an historical lack of faith in their surroundings, their sense of place identity, their challenges maintaining interpersonal bonds, and their expectation of rejection in the dominant socio-political arena of whiteness.
“Maternal Fathers; or, the Power of Sympathy: Wheatley’s Poem to George Washingt
Published: Jan 13, 2014 by Literature in the Early American Republic
Authors: Jillmarie Murphy
Subjects:
History, Literature
Composed shortly after Congress appointed Washington "Generalissimo of the armies of north America" in 1775, Wheatley's poem has come to represent the mythic proportions to which his reputation would swell during the American Revolution and his canonization over the course of his presidency and after his death. The poem emphasizes Washington's virtue as an imperative to liberate the "land of freedom's heaven-defended race!
A National Icon
Published: Jan 13, 2014 by Emerson in Context
Authors: Jillmarie Murphy
Subjects:
Literature
Considers Emerson’s dual role as an object of scholarly veneration and as a presumed product endorser for advertisers throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Because many advertisers recognized Emerson’s prominence as an important intellectual figure in American literary culture they began co-opting both his image and many of his quotes shortly after his death in 1882, facilitating Emerson’s status as one of the most oft-quoted Americans of all time.
“New England Poetry”
Published: Jun 01, 2008 by Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature
Authors: Jillmarie Murphy and Ronald A. Bosco
Subjects:
History, Literature
Focuses primarily on Puritan poets Anne Bradstreet, Michael Wigglesworth, and Edward Taylor as representative poets of the early American colonial period.