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by Erin Shields
(BA with Honours in English, 2016)

Professor Stuart J. Murray, of �Ӱ�ԭ��’s Department of English Language and Literature, has recently been inducted into the inaugural cohort of The College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. The College is a new body of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), recognizing intellectual leaders in their field. It is the highest honour for emerging scholars in Canada.

The College reflects the changing face of academia, with its members consisting of a new generation of diverse, social-media-wielding scholars, scientists and artists who are working for the betterment of Canadian society. Traditional RSC fellows, typically elected on the basis of lifetime achievement, are categorized according to three disciplines, whereas the College gathers together younger scholars from across the disciplines in order to foster multidisciplinary dialogue and innovative approaches to contemporary social issues. Already, Murray has received his first “assignment”: to introduce a colleague he has been paired with, in 70 words or less (and in both official languages), at the College’s first Annual General Meeting—and he has been paired with a scientist who works in Quantum Computing. “I don’t even understand all of the terms,” Murray confesses, “it’s so far outside of my area of expertise! So I went and researched his work, as much as I could, to learn a little about it, and it’s fascinating.”

Murray is no stranger to interdisciplinarity. He is the Canada Research Chair in Rhetoric and Ethics; his work uses literary and rhetorical methodologies to take a critical look at the workings of “biopolitics” in society, or, the politics surrounding life and death. Murray describes his scholarly focus as “thinking ethically about the ways our conceptions of life and death get framed and constructed rhetorically through discourses, through texts, through images, through emotions even, and how this framing—how this construction of life—then gets taken up in health, in science, in criminal justice, and so on.” “I don’t really pay attention to department lines,” he says. Evidently.

Both Professor Murray and Professor Sheryl Hamilton, the other �Ӱ�ԭ�� scholar who has been inducted into the College, have interdisciplinary programs of research. “We represent some of �Ӱ�ԭ��’s values in terms of interdisciplinarity,” Murray says, “and I’m proud of that, that’s why I came here. �Ӱ�ԭ�� is a place where I can do the work that I do and be supported and encouraged.” But moreover, Murray argues that the interdisciplinary nature of his work is also “oddly representative” of �Ӱ�ԭ��’s English department: English professors offer courses that mobilize insights from multiple disciplines through the study of literature, from traditional Western classics to Digital Studies in the humanities, African Studies, Ethics, Queer and Gender Studies and more, reaching into the past and into the future. Murray may not be paying attention to department lines, but it seems that the English department has its own fluidity, and a shared concern with ethical and cultural life, making it ideal for Murray as an academic home base.

The College has been created at a time when the RSC is particularly interested in debates surrounding the future of higher education in Canada. In a world that seems increasingly to be turning away from the Arts, Murray offers not only an example of how an Arts education can be applied to pressing social issues, but he is also a passionate advocate for the importance of an Arts education in the creation of ethical and compassionate citizens. The study of literature is intrinsically interdisciplinary and diverse, and so it offers a multiplicity of perspectives. Murray argues that the manipulation of subjectivities within literature helps us to reflect critically upon our own world-views, and to develop a self-reflexivity without which “we’re operating in the dark.” “A work of literature gives us different terms with which to understand ourselves and what it means to be a responsible and caring person in relation to others.”

Yet the type of compassion invoked by Murray should not be confused with getting a case of the warm and fuzzies. In Lynn Coady’s Munro Beattie lecture this year, she talked about “storytelling and discomfort”—that is, how having to take on the perspective of others can be an uncomfortable experience. Murray believes that this kind of discomfort is vital. There is “something about writing and reading about yourself, and seeing yourself or experiencing yourself in a different way—sympathizing with the villain, say, and accounting for that—that makes you a better person, and by better I mean more ethical, more compassionate.” He sees his work as asking and confronting “uncomfortable questions about the ways that we are complicit in wider systems that are often simply unjust, intolerable or ultimately unliveable.”

The College, operating in its outreach and advisory capacity, will provide a platform for scholars like Murray to have their work reach a wider and more influential audience. With its mandate focused on social media, interdisciplinarity, and social justice, the creation of the College is in itself a kind of political move, Murray says: “it both acknowledges the direction that higher education is going and it renews a political commitment to engage a younger generation of scholars to be leaders and decision-makers—and that’s really exciting. It’s daunting, but it’s exciting.”