Faculty

Kevin Murphy joined the Ithaca College Department of English in 1979 and retired in 2021.  Before coming to Ithaca, he also taught at Cornell University, Universite de Lille (Fulbright Lecturer), Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Seoul National University (Peace Corps Lecturer).  In Spring 2004, he was appointed the Robert Ryan Professor of Humanities and was designated Professor Emeritus in 2022. During his initial years with the department, he focused on courses of American poetry and American studies, offering seminars on Whitman and Dickinson, Modern American Poetry, and an interdisciplinary honors seminar, “The Eye of the Beholder: American Visions in 19th Century Literature, Architecture, and Painting.”   The latter part of his teaching at IC was focused on Modern Irish poetry, with a particular emphasis on W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney.  His seminar on James Joyce’s Ulysses was a regular offering as well.   Throughout his four decades in the department, he taught Introduction to Poetry, a survey course open to the entire college.

Courses Taught

• American Writers Since 1890: The Status of Women in Modern American Fiction
• Modern Irish Literature
• The Eye of the Beholder: American Visions in 19th Century Literature, Architecture, and Painting (honors seminar) - Course Web Site
• James Joyce's Ulysses (seminar)
• American Poetry
• Introduction to Poetry

Selected Publications

• "Heaney Translating Heaney: Coupling and Uncoupling the Human Chain," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Fall 2016), 352-368.
• "'It's not that I can't imagine still': The Reprise of Imagination in Seamus Heaney's Human Chain, The Recorder, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 2012), 104-119.
• "The Pulse at the Center, the Shiver at the Rim: "Seamus Heaney's District and Circle," The Recorder, Vol. 19, No. 2 & 20, No.1 (Summer 2007), 185-201.
• "Reviving/Revising Yeats: R. F. Foster's Yeats: A Life; Volume Two: The Arch-Poet," The Recorder, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Summer 2004), 155-165.
• "Reinvention and Rejuvenation: The Poetry of Ciaran Carson and John Montague,"Irish Literary Supplement, Vol. 20, No.2 (Fall 2001), 12-14.
• "Four Portraits of Wind" and "Northern Light," The Recorder, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Spring 2000), 126.
• "The Growth of a Poet's Mind: Seamus Heaney's Opened Ground and Helen Vendler's Seamus Heaney," Bookpress (February 1999), 6+
• "Irish Journal," The Bookpress, Vol. 8, No. 7  (November 1998), 1+
• "154 Ways of Looking at a Sonnet: Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets," The Bookpress, Vol. 7, No. 9 (March 1998), 8-9.
• "Derek Mahon," in Modern Irish Writers, ed. Alex Gonzalez, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997, 209-14.
• "Fenton's Wooden Horse: How the English Praise the Irish," The Bookpress, Vol. 6, No. 5 (September 1996), 1+
• "Walt Whitman and Louis Sullivan: The Aesthetics of Egalitarianism," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (Summer 1988), 1-15.