Julie Murray

Associate Professor

• B.A. (Queen’s University), M.A. (University of Toronto), Ph.D. (York University)
• Email Julie Murray

Research Interests

• Eighteenth-century British literature and culture
• British Romanticism
• Literary Theory/Cultural Theory
• Book History
• Theories and Histories of Modernity
• Literature and Critical Human Rights/Humanitarianism
• Feminist Theory and Gender Studies

Current Research

My current research interests are in eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century British literature and culture with a focus on feminism and histories and theories of modernity. My forthcoming book, Mary Wollstonecraft Against Modernity (2026), argues that Western feminism and global modernity have been on a collision course for over two centuries, and that Mary Wollstonecraft is simultaneously one of their unlikeliest and most bracing critics.

My current research project, “A Literary History of Women-as-Index,” is funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant. I explore what it means for women to be an “index” of modernity. Where does the concept of “women-as-index” come from? In historical terms, women-as-index originated in the late-18thC by Scottish Enlightenment historians who argued that men’s “humane” treatment of women was an index of a society’s relative “progress.” The project traces women-as-index from this late 18th-C start through to its 21st-C iterations in institutions such as the UN Development Programme, which uses the metric of women-as-index in its formulations about social, global economic, and gendered inequality.

In 2017, I co-organized with Lauren Gillingham (University of Ottawa) the 25th meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) on the topic of “Romantic Life.” Papers from the conference were published in the conference volume of European Romantic Review 29.3 (June 2018): 271-430.

I welcome inquiries from graduate students interested in working on any aspect of eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature and culture; eighteenth and nineteenth-century histories of the book; histories of feeling and emotion; feminism and gender studies; humanitarianism and literature.

Recent Honours and Awards

• SSHRC Insight Development Grant, “A Literary History of Women-as-Index” (2023-26)
• 2019-20 Faculty Graduate Mentoring Award
• (co-applicant) SSHRC Insight Development Grant, “Feeling Life: Biopolitics, Literature, and Humanitarian Sentimentality” (2016-19)
• SSHRC 4A Research Grant, 2014, 2015.
• Nominee, 2013 Faculty Graduate Mentoring Award
• Carleton University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Junior Faculty Research Award, 2013
• Chawton House Library Fellow, May 2012

Books

Mary Wollstonecraft Against Modernity. Stanford University Press. Forthcoming, 2026.

Edited Volumes

“Romantic Life.” NASSR conference issue co-edited with Lauren Gillingham. European Romantic Review. 29.3 (June 2018): 271-430.

Selected Articles and Book Chapters

Six entries in The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820. Ed. April London. “Memoirs of Female Philosophers…By a Modern Philosopher of the Other Sex (1808); The Empire of the Nairs: Or, Rights of Women. An Utopian Romance (1811); Marian (1812); The Heart and the Fancy, Or, Valsinore. A Tale (1813); Gulzara, Princess of Persia; Or, The Virgin Queen (1816); The Royal Wanderer, Or The Exile of England (1815).” Cambridge UP. Forthcoming.

“Sensibility: passion, emotion, affect.” The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Thought. Ed. Frans De Bruyn. Cambridge UP, 2021. 227-247.

“1970s Critical Reception.” Mary Wollstonecraft in Context. Eds. Nancy E. Johnson and Paul Keen. Cambridge UP, 2020. 57-63.

“Mary Wollstonecraft, Feminist Killjoy.” Romantic Circles, Praxis Series. “Mary Wollstonecraft Even Now.” Ed. Sonia Hofkosh. October 2019.

“Mary Wollstonecraft and Modernity.” Women’s Writing 23.3 (July 2016): 366-77. (Special Issue: Festschrift in honour of Professor Janet Todd: “A Life in Feminist Scholarship”).

“The Country and the City and the Colony in The Woman of Colour.” LUMEN. Vol. 33 (2014): 87-99.

“Company Rules: Burke, Hastings, and the Specter of the Modern Liberal State.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 41.1 (2007): 55-69.

“Governing Economic Man: Joanna Baillie’s Theatre of Utility.” ELH (English Literary History) 70.4 (2003): 1043-65.

Recent Presentations

“Modern Traditional: Tradwives and the Paradox of Womanhood.” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Online Conference. April 2025.

“Virginia Woolf, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Female Biography.” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Toronto, April 2024.

“Towards a Literary History of Women-as-Index.” Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Montreal, October 2023.

“Feminism Against Modernity.” Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. University of Ottawa, October 2022.

“Mary Wollstonecraft Among the Anthropologists.” Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. University of Winnipeg (online conference), October, 2021.

“Feminist Historiography’s Stadialism.” International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Edinburgh, July 2019.

“Mary Wollstonecraft and Presentism.” North American Society for the Study of Romanticism. Chicago, August 2019.

Recent Graduate Courses

• ENGL 6003: What is a Book?
• ENGL 5402: “Being Human” in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture
• ENGL 5408: Romanticism and Human Rights

Graduate Supervisions

Doctoral

Dana Mitchell. “Loving Keats: Gender, Affect, and Romantic Receptions.” In progress.

Emma Peacocke. “Public Museums and British Romanticism.” (Defended April 2013)

Masters

(Co-supervisor) Ingrid Reiche. “A Digital Edition of A General History of the Pyrates.” (Defended April 2016)