Professor Murray studies the interplay among, mass social movements, liberal institutions, capitalism, and the world of African American letters broadly construed.

Murray's research privileges the overlays among African American literary culture and the broader political and social histories of the US. Along these lines, his first book, Our Living Manhood: Literature, Black Power, and Masculine Ideology, argues that scholars have not adequately examined the gendered nationalisms that shaped the Black Power movement. For some time now commentators have criticized the movement for its sexism and its broader preoccupation with refashioning black masculinity. Yet few have remarked the challenge to this masculinist current voiced in the work of male authors such as James Alan McPherson, James Baldwin, John Edgar Wideman, Clarence Major, Hal Bennett, and John Oliver Killens. In fiction and essays written during the heyday of Black Power activism, these writers tracked the political incoherence, fragmentation, and anxiety that beset nationalisms tethered to identity politics. The era's masculine focus thus bred contradictions for those within the movement and criticisms from those outside it. To reassess these cleavages, Murray analyzes the ways in which notions of masculinity were interwoven with nationalist ideologies regarding revolutionary violence, charismatic leadership, radical rhetoric, and black sexuality. 

Cultural history figures centrally in Murray's recent work as well. His current book project, Blackness Incorporated: Market Culture, Institutionalization, and African American Literature, pivots on a tension between black literary writing and historical developments that have recently granted this corpus greater visibility and esteem in American culture.  Beginning in the 1980s two distinctive yet interdependent currents, the expansion of a distinctive market for African American literature and the consolidation of African American literary studies as an institutionalized academic field, powerfully refashioned the style and politics of black literary art. In ways at once strategic and unconscious, polemical and aesthetic, African American writers have negotiated these changing material conditions. These authors elaborate intricate counters to the protocols that define black literary texts as legible commodities and legitimate objects of study while also developing aesthetic strategies that trade in these same forms of social value. Addressing works by authors across literary genres (poetry, fiction, drama, and the essay) this book tracks these historical processes with reference to a wide range of black literary expression.

Bronson Fellowship, Brown University, 2006-07

Fellowship, The Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African
Studies, University of Virginia, 1998-2000

Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, University of Chicago, 1998-99 (declined)

Trustee Fellowship, University of Chicago, 1992-93, 1994-98

Joe Weixlmann Award (best essay on 20th- and 21st- century literature) African American Review, 2009

Bronson Fellowship, Brown University, 2006-07

Fellowship, The Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African
Studies, University of Virginia, 1998-2000

Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, University of Chicago, 1998-99 (declined)

Trustee Fellowship, University of Chicago, 1992-93, 1994-98

Modern Language Association

Midwest Modern Language Association

Rolland Murray's courses focus on twentieth century American and African American literature. He has taught classes addressing literature and mass culture, the literature of the Black Power era, the literature of slavery, and African American identity politics.