蜜桃社

256.765.4893

UNA Box 5050

110 Willingham Hall

Professor of English and Director, Restorative Justice Lab

Alabama State Coordinator for the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program

Email: kowensmurphy@una.edu

Research & Teaching fields:

American literature, theories of lyric and narrative, prison literature, Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program

Publications:

Books

• Ghosts Over the Boiler: Voices from Alabama's Death Row (Vanderbilt UP, 2023)

• Lyrical Strategies: The Poetics of the Twentieth-Century American Novel. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018.  

• ”Toward a Counterfactual Narrative Criminology: The IF Project.” With Yaschica Williams-Jackson and Christopher W. Purser. Accepted at Contemporary Justice Review.
  Interview with Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty. Critical Criminology 31.1 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-022-09669-2
  
• “Reading Behind Bars: Literacy and Survival in U.S. Prison Literature.” Humanities 12.1 (2023). https://doi.org/10.3390/h12010002  
• “Public History in the Age of Insurrection: Confronting White Rage in Red States.” With Brian Murphy. The Public Historian 44.3 (August 2022): 139-163. Winner, G. Wesley Johnson Award for best article in The Public Historian in 2022.
• “Introduction: Rethinking Mass Incarceration through the US South.” With Jeanine Weekes Schroer. Mississippi Quarterly 74.1 (Winter 2021): 1-8.
• “Choose Your Own Homicide: Tinkering with the Machinery of Death in Alabama.” With Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty. Mississippi Quarterly 74.1 (Winter 2021): 125-142. 
• "So We Went to Prison . . ." with Yaschica Williams and Christopher W. Purser. Chronicle of Higher Education.  

Courses taught:

• American Literature, Whitman through the present
• The American Novel
• Contemporary American Literature
• Prison Literature in the U.S.
• The Literature of Capital Punishment
• Introduction to Restorative Justice
• Restorative Storytelling
• Introduction to Graduate Studies
• Literary Criticism
• Literary Pedagogies