Cailín Murray
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Cailín Murray is Associate Professor of Anthropology. Her research areas include two overlapping streams: the environmental ethnohistory of settler colonialism in North America and the anthropology of the supernatural. Much of her recent work has explored the relationship between the physical environment, supernatural beliefs and the conflicts between settler colonial and Native American ways of making places.
Dr. Murray’s previously conducted ethnohistorical and ethnographic research in the Pacific Northwest within federally recognized tribal communities. She is currently working on a project about household food security, Christian beliefs and settler colonialism in the 19th century American Midwest. What aligns her research is her interest in the historical environmental spaces where settler colonial and indigenous cultures converge.
Dr. Murray teaches Ethnohistorical Methods, the Anthropology of Folklore and Folklife, Magic, Witchcraft and Religion, Native Americans of the Eastern Woodlands, Introduction to Native American Studies, and the Anthropology of Everyday Life: Monsters in Our Midst.
Key terms: Ethnohistory, North America, indigenous studies, settler colonialism, supernatural beliefs, ghosts and monsters, ethnohistory of urban environments, food studies.
Recent Publications
Murray, Cailín E. "Don't Say His Name." In Living with Monsters: Ethnographic Fiction about Real Monsters, eds. Yasmine Musharbash and llana Gershon (Galeta: California: Punctum Books, 2023) pp. 31-50.
Murray, Cailín E. Introduction: Extraordinary, Ambiguous and Unsettling. Ethnologia Actualis, Volume 21, no. 1, 2021.
Murray, Cailín. The Olympic Mountains, the Sacrality of Water and the Klallam Universe. In Sacred Waters: A Cross-Cultural Compendium of Hallowed Springs and Holy Wells, ed. Celeste Ray (London: Routledge, 2020), 266-274.
Murray, Cailín. Bodies, artifacts and ghosts: NAGPRA and the Unsettling of Settler Colonialism. In The Varieties of Historical Experience, eds. S. Palmé and C. Stewart (London: Routledge, 2019), 169-189.
Murray, Cailín. Locating the Wild Man: Rain Forest Enchantments and Settler Colonial Fantasies amid the Ruins of the Anthropocene. Historical Sociology, Special Monsters edition, Volume 32, no. 1 (April 2019): 60-73.
Murray, Cailín. Michael Harkin’s Feeling and Thinking in Memory and Forgetting: Toward an Ethnohistory of the Emotions. Ethnohistory, Volume 66, no.1 (January 2019): 195-198.
Kawa, Nicholas, Bradley Painter and Cailín E. Murray. Trail Trees: Living Artifacts (Vivifacts) of Eastern North America. Ethnobiology Letters, Volume 6, no. 1 (September 2015): 183-188.
Vita (PDF)