Overview
Grace Murry is a PhD candidate in the department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Her research interests include Black feminist disability studies, mad studies, Black feminist studies, and Black affect theory.
Grace’s dissertation identifies madness as an affective mode utilized by contemporary and twenty-first century American Black women writers to challenge and escape the confines of Western onto-epistemology. She proposes reading with the “fugue state,” incorporating its roots in music, psychiatry, and fugitivity, to describe and analyze the various ways madness is rendered in the texts she considers. Through engaging with the lives and works of Black women writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Tananarive Due, and Alice Walker, she asks: what possibilities arise if we consider madness as more than an affliction to heal from? And, in the spirit of Toni Cade Bambara, how do we get well?
Research Focus
- African American literature
- Disability literature
- Feminist literature
- Literature of the 20th & 21st centuries
- Popular culture
- Media studies