Professor Soraya Murray is an interdisciplinary scholar who focuses on contemporary visual culture, with particular interest in art, cultural studies, film and video games. Murray holds a Ph.D. in art history and visual studies from Cornell University, and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine. An Associate Professor in the Film + Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she is also affiliated with the History of Art and Visual Culture Department, and teaches a core course for the Art + Design: Games + Playable Media Program.
Murray researches and teaches in the following areas:
- Visual culture studies including contemporary art, film, and electronic games
- Critical game studies
- New media art, theory, and criticism
- Theories of technology and its imaginaries
- Contemporary art and globalization
- History of art and technology
- Science-fiction (utopia / dystopia / apocalypse / technothriller )
- Representations of otherness/race/class/gender/sexuality
Feel free to contact me for articles/writings if you are unable to access them online.
CURRENT PROJECTS:
Technothriller: American Technological Imaginaries in Film and Visual Culture (single-author book)
Antiracist Futures: Games, Play and the Speculative Imagination (Co-edited anthology with TreaAndrea Russworm)
BOOK: ON VIDEO GAMES
Selected Writing
“No Country For Old Tropes: Representation and Political Affect in Red Dead Redemption 2” in forthcoming anthology Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth and Violence in the Videogame West, University of Oklahoma Press 2023 (7000 words), eds. John Wills and Esther Wright.
“Coda: Disoriented in the Field of Play” in Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies, ed. Dietmar Meinel (Berlin: De Gruyter, March 2022)
“Decisions, Decisions: Narrative Video Games, Perspectivization and Implicit Politics” 2022.
“Domestic Snapshots: Female Self-Imaging Practices Then and Now” in Visual Culture Approaches to the Selfie (ed. Derek Conrad Murray, Routledge 2021)
Spotlight Interview by TreaAndrea Russworm in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies Vol. 60, No. 1 (Fall 2020): 1-3.
“The Last of Us and Masculinity” in How to Play Video Games, Nina Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne, eds. (New York: NYU Press, March 2019)
“Augmented Reality Bites: Black Mirror’s “Playtest” and the Unstable Now” in eds. Terence McSweeney and Stuart Joy, Through The Black Mirror: Deconstructing the Side Effects of the Digital Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
“The Triumphal Procession” in ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories Vol.1, No. 1 (July 2019).
“The Rubble and the Ruin: Race, Gender and Sites of Inglorious Conflict in Spec Ops: The Line” in Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, edited by Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.
“Race, Gender, and Genre in Spec Ops: The Line,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 70, Iss. 2, (Dec 2016
Conversation with Artist in Kori Newkirk: Sometimes Always Perhaps Never [artist monograph] (Los Angeles: LM Projects, 2015)
“Threeview: Thief reviewed by a critic, an analyst, and an academic” in VentureBeat, http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/21/threeview-thief-reviewed-by-a-critic-an-analyst-and-an-academic/, March 21, 2014.
“Threeview: Grand Theft Auto V reviewed by a critic, an analyst, and an academic” in VentureBeat, http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/30/threeview-grand-theft-auto-v-reviewed-by-a-critic-an-analyst-and-an-academic/September 30, 2013.
“Threeview: The Last of Us reviewed by a critic, an analyst, and an academic” in VentureBeat, http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/01/threeview-the-last-of-us/, July 1, 2013.
“Theorizing New Media in a Global Context; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love New Media” in FILE Festival Catalog, Electronic Language International Festival, 2013, organized by Paula Perissinotto e Richard Barreto (São Paolo, Brazil: Thaïs Costa, 2013), 10-23. [translated into Portuguese]
“Theorizing New Media in a Global Context; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love New Media” in CTheory, http://ctheory.net/ctheory_wp/theorizing-new-media-in-a-global-context/, published November 13, 2012.
“Threeview: Call of Duty: Black Ops II reviewed by a critic, an analyst, and an academic” in VentureBeat, http://venturebeat.com/2012/12/04/threeview-call-of-duty-black- ops-ii/#mrJK2hur6sr24lMI.99, December 4, 2012.
“Threeview: Assassin’s Creed III reviewed by a critic, an analyst, and an academic” in VentureBeat, http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/20/threeview-assassins-creed- iii/, November 20, 2012.
“Public Ritual: William Pope.L and Exorcisms of Abject Otherness,” in Public Art Review, 2010.
“On Art and Contamination: Performing Authenticity in Global Art Practices,” Co-authored with Derek Conrad Murray, in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 22/23 (Spring/Summer 2008): 88-93.
SORAYA MURRAY 