Modern meets medieval in Murphy’s literature class
By Lindsey Kennedy
Students experience a blast from the past when they take medieval literature with Assistant Professor Patrick Murphy. Although this is only Murphy’s second year teaching at Miami, he already has the reputation as the “comic book guy”—even though many of his classes are about the earliest surviving English texts.
Between hand-outs, titled “Lord of the Thesis” that explain the correct way to construct a term paper to acting out the comics’ character roles through varied voices, it’s not hard for students to crack a few smiles and laughs in his class.
“Some things are just natural to you,” said Murphy, who received his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Somehow comics express my personality better than other things. It just seemed like a natural move to incorporate them in my classes. When you’re teaching, you really have to be who are you are and express your personality to students.”
Murphy has been intrigued with comics ever since he was little boy. His gift for drawing continued to grow throughout his high school years where he’d sketch out comics on notebook paper and pass them around to friends. During his undergraduate education at Denison University in central Ohio, Murphy created a comic strip for the school newspaper, The Denisonian.
Now, Murphy incorporates his comics in PowerPoint presentations to explain medieval culture.
“Sometimes the material can be very confusing if you don’t have something memorable and colorful,” said Murphy. “Comics allow me to compress a lot of information into a short lecture. Even basic divisions between the world of Beowulf and Chaucer’s England can seem obscure to students new to medieval literature. I want to clarify a complex situation as much as possible.”
Through comics drawing, Murphy is able to accomplish just that.
“Cartoons are one way I show my love for the job,” he said.
When Murphy isn’t preparing for class, creating comics, or spending time with his wife Nicole and their ten-month-old daughter, Nora, he is working on his book, Dark Tracks: Reading the Exeter Riddles in Context. Murphy’s book, which evolved from his Ph.D. dissertation, will explicitly discuss approximately forty of these Old English riddle-poems in detail.
“My project is about trying to see whether or not we’re reading the riddles on their own terms,” Murphy said. “A lot of times, they’ve not been read in their context. They’ve been read according to a modern individual’s wit.”
Murphy has already published several articles on the Old English riddles and is readying his book-length study for publication.
For his next project, he is beginning work on an edited book, tentatively titled Medievalists Read the Antiquarian: Essays on the Fiction of M.R. James with Denison University Professor Frederick Porcheddu.
In fact, it was while studying with Dr. Porcheddu as an undergraduate that Murphy first came across the approximately 1,000-year-old Exeter Riddles. He’s been fascinated with the topic and friends with his former teacher ever since.
With only a select number of jobs in the United States fitting Murphy’s medieval literature background, he considers it a privilege to be teaching at Miami.
“Honestly, this was the only job I wanted,” he said. “I feel so lucky. It’s a dream job to be here.” Murphy believes he has the best of both worlds at Miami.
“There’s a good balance between teaching and research here,” he said. “People honestly want to be great teachers here.”