I have my Ph.D, now what? For an insider’s look, we welcomed GSAS ’06 alum, Michael Murray, Ph.D. to @PennCareerDay on Wednesday April 18th. To learn more about Michael read below, and read his posts from the 18th, check out our Storify account.
Michael L. Murray (PhD, Folklore and Folklife, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, ‘06) is an English Lecturer in the School of General Studies at Kean University in Union, NJ. As a folklorist, Michael’s research interests are in traditional culture in the American suburb, vernacular art and artists, and public culture studies. But, through various student teaching experiences at Penn and UNC-Chapel Hill (where he earned a master’s degree in folklore), Michael has cultivated a career as a teacher of college writing and a specialist in undergraduate general education. Following his graduation from Penn, Michael served for five years as a Lecturer in Writing at Princeton University where he taught interdisciplinary writing seminars on folklore, ethnography, and cultural studies. And he is an Associate in the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College where he has taught the Language and Thinking Workshop for first-year Bard students and Young Writer’s Workshops for high school students from across the globe.
In his current role at Kean, Michael teaches writing-intensive courses across the curriculum–from writing studies and advanced composition for English majors to general education requirements, such as freshman composition, college success, and world literature. With a training in folklore and ethnography, Michael routinely draws on skills and methodologies he gained in the study of expressive culture at Penn to develop his teaching, as well as find his “way” as an interdisciplinary scholar in the disciplined world of an English writing program.
