she/her
Arts Division
Associate Professor
Faculty
Porter College
Communications Building
109
email for appointment / email is the best way to reach me
Film and Digital Media
Soraya Murray (PhD Cornell) studies contemporary visual culture, especially film and video games. She is an Associate Professor in the Film + Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her writings may be found in journals in the areas of contemporary art, film and digital culture, including venues such as Art Journal, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Public Art Review, Third Text, Open Library of Humanities, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Feminist Media Histories, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, the European Journal of American Studies, Film Quarterly and Critical Inquiry.
Her essays are anthologized nationally and internationally, including most recently, EcoGames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis (Holland 2024), Reset (Italy 2023), Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth and Violence in the Video Game West (USA 2023) and Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies (Germany 2022). Murray joined the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies editorial board in 2023, and is a member of the critical/historical game studies journal ROMchip’s editorial group.
Murray’s book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018, paperback Bloomsbury 2021), considers video games from a visual culture perspective and how they both mirror and are constitutive of larger societal fears, dreams, hopes and even complex struggles for recognition. Murray is currently co-editing an anthology with media and games scholar TreaAndrea Russworm on antiracist futures in games and play. She is also writing a book on the highly raced and gendered technological imaginary within American technothriller films from the 1970s to the present, called Technothriller.
Murray is currently the Provost of Porter College.
Ph.D., Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
M.A., Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
M.F.A., University of California, Irvine, CA
B.F.A., Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA
Visual culture including digital media, film, video, and electronic games. Theories of technology and globalization. Media representations of technological and scientific advancement.
Visual culture including contemporary art, film and video games. Digital media art, theory, and criticism. Cultural Studies. Theories of technology and globalization. Intersectional approaches to politics of identity and representation.
Visual Studies, Digital Media and Culture; Cultural Studies; Media History and Theory; Contemporary Art; Film Studies; Issues of Cultural Globalization; Constructions of Identity; Video Games; Cultural Representations of Technology
On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, hard 2018 / paper 2021)
