Overview
A Professor of Comparative Literature and Literatures in English, Timothy Murray is Director of the Cornell Council for the Arts, Curator of the Cornell Biennial, Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, and co-moderator of the -empyre- new media listserv. A curator of contemporary art and theorist of the cinematic and digital arts, he is Chair of the Board of Directors of Humanities New York, and sits on the Executive Committee of HASTAC. He is a Senior Fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory, PI of Cornell's Mellon Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, and Foreign PI in the Global Research Network of the National Research Foundation of Korea. He is the author of Medium Philosophicum: para un pensamiento tecnológico del arte (Murcia/CENDEAC, forthcoming, 2022), Technics Improvised: Activating Touch in Global Media Art (Minnesota, 2022), Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota, 2008), Zonas de Contacto: el arte en CD-Rom (Centro de la Imagen, 1999), Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, Art (Routledge, 1997), Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (Routledge, 1993), Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius In XVIIth-Century England and France (Oxford, 1987), ed., Mimesis, Masochism Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Michigan, 1997), ed. with Shin-Yi Yang, Xu Bing's Background Stories (Life Bookstore Publishing, Mandarin), and ed. with Alan Smith, Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms of Early-Modern Culture (Minnesota, 1998). His curated exhibitions include the 2022 Cornell Biennial, "Futurities, Uncertain," 2020 Cornell Biennial, "Swarm: Ecology, Digitality, Sociality," 2018 Cornell Biennial, "Duration: Passage, Persistance, Survival," Cornell Library's 2016 "Signal to Code: Fifty Years of Media Art in the Goldsen Archive," Hunter College Art Galleries' 2015 "Experimental Television Center: ETC...," CTHEORY Multimedia (2000-2003), and "Contact Zones: The Art of CD-Rom" touring from 1999-2004.
His research and teaching crosses the boundaries of new media, film and video, visual studies, twentieth-century Continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical theory, performance, and English and French early modern studies.
Research Focus
- Digital Art, Film, and Video
- Theatre and performance
- Psychoanalysis
- Aesthetics
- Cultural studies
- Lesbian, bisexual, and gay literary studies
- Digital Arts and Humanities
- Film and Video, Theory and History
- Continental Philosophy and Psychoanalysis
- Visual Studies
- Performance
- French Studies
- Early Modern Studies
In the news
- Multi-college scholars think deeply about cities
- Book views virtual, real world through a new media artist’s eyes
- Migrations grants fund worldwide interdisciplinary projects
- 2022 Cornell Biennial artist preview
- Professor named chair of state humanities organization
- Mellon grant boosts collaborative projects for equity, social justice
- CCA Biennial launches with art projects across campus
- Dance, multimedia performance to open 2018 CCA Biennial
- 2018 Biennial on 'Duration' to feature major artists
- Mellon grant extends collaborative seminar series
- Summer School in Theory holds first session in Shanghai
- Cornell launches new humanities collaboration in China