King's College London

Teaching Fellow in Victorian Literature, Department of English

Thesis Title: Henry Morton Stanley and the Literature of Exploration: Empire, Media, Modernity

About

My work focuses on the ways in which exploration literature interacts with narratives of modernity and progress in the late-nineteenth century. More specifically, I’m interested in how H. M. Stanley’s exploration narratives relate to contemporary developments in anthropology, telecommunications, tourism and museum culture.

My other areas of interest include literary and artistic reactions to the laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable; Victorian Afrocentrism; ballad collecting in Victorian Britain and Ireland; and literary quotation in nineteenth-century travel writing.

brian.murray@kcl.ac.uk
Twitter: @BrianHMur

Publications:

'Savage Telegraphy: Media Time and Primtive Man in H.M. Stanley's Through the Dark Continent' in Trish Ferguson (ed.), Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012)
‘“Lay in Egypt’s lap each borrowed crown”: Gerald Massey and Late-Victorian Afrocentrism’ in Daniel Orrells, Gurminder Bhambra and Tessa Roynon (eds.), African Athena: New Agendas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
‘Revisiting Darkest Africa’, Oxonian Review of Books, 6.3 (2007).

As editor (with Clare Pettitt):
H. M. Stanley, In Darkest Africa (Toronto: Broadview, 2012).

Recent Papers and Talks:

‘Buried Under and Mountain of Printed Paper’: Travel Writing, Art and Originality in Dickens’s Pictures from Italy. Dickens Day. Senate House, University of London, 15 October 2011.
Ulysses in Darkest Africa:  Poetry, Exploration and the Failure of Composition, 1878-1901. British Association of Victorian Studies Annual Conference. University of Birmingham, 2-4 September 2011. 
'Englishmen and Americans are the same people': H.M. Stanley and the Self-Invention of an 'Anglo-Saxon Explorer. Travelling Identities. Birkbeck, University of London, 18 June 2011. 
Miniature Kingdoms: H.M. Stanley and his ‘African Dwarfs’. The London Nineteenth-Century Seminar. Senate House, University of London, 19 February 2011. 
‘Stanley and his African Dwarfs: Miniatures, Metaphors and Manikins in H.M. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa.’ North American Victorian Studies Association, Annual Conference. Montreal, 11-13 November 2010.
‘Geographical Form: The Exploration Narratives of H. M. Stanley’. British Association of Victorian Studies Annual Conference. University of Glasgow, 2-4 September 2010.
‘Performing Modernity in H.M. Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent.’ Performing Colonial Modernity. University of Edinburgh, 18-19 May 2010. 
‘Savage Telegraphy’: Modern Communication and Primitive Expression in Henry Morton Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent (1878). ‘Past Vs Present’: Joint meeting of the British Association for Victorian Studies and the North American Victorian Studies Association. Churchill College, Cambridge, 13-15 July 2009.

Teaching:

Urban Field Studies: London as Text (2012)
Fin de Siècle (2012)
Memory and Time in the Nineteenth Century (2010-2012)
The Victorians Abroad (2011)
The Victorians and Social Change (2011)
Darwin's Culture (2010)
Writing London (2009-2011)

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