Jackie Murray

Jackie Murray is Associate Professor of Classics at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is an expert on imperial Greek literature, Hellenistic poetry, and the reception of Classics in African American and Afro-Caribbean literature.

An early printed copy of Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica published in Latin (1572)

Education

Murray received her PhD in Classics from the University of Washington in 2005. Her doctoral thesis was entitled Polyphonic Argo. Murray completed her BA (Summa Cum Laude) at the University of Guelph in Classical Studies and Latin, and she was awarded an MA in classics from the University of Western Ontario.

Career

Murray's published research focuses on Roman and Hellenistic literature, especially Apollonius, and race and ethnicity in the ancient world.

Murray received the Andrew Heiskell/National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (2011–12). She was the first black woman to be awarded the Rome Prize in ancient studies. Her research project focused on Apollonius’ Argonautica. Since then she has held a Margo Tytus Fellowship for Visiting Scholars at the University of Cincinnati (2017), a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) Fellowship in 2021. Murray was the John P. Birkelund Fellow in the Humanities at the American Academy in Berlin (Fall 2022), and a Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Hellenic Studies (2025), where she has previous held a scholarship and visiting fellowship (2018 and 2020). From 2014-2022 She was Associate Professor of Classics in the Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Department at the University of Kentucky. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) in 2023.

Publications

Murray's Curriculum Vitae is available on Academia.edu. She has written articles on Hellenistic Poetry, focusing on Apollonius of Rhodes, Callimachus of Cyrene, and Herodas, as well as on the female poets, Erinna, Nossis, and Anyte. Her 2014 article, Anchored in Time: The Date in Apollonius' Argonautica, uses the astronomical references in the Argonautica to show that the poem commemorates the year 238 BCE. In 238 BCE, Ptolemy III Euergetes introduced the first 365.25 day calendar with a leap year. The leap year was a reform to the Egyptian 365 day Sirius based Calendar. The star's periodicity is very close to the sun's making it seem like a solar calendar. Murray's argument returns the dating of the Argonautica back to the late 3rd century dating reported all the ancient sources except the so-called List of Alexandrian Librarians (P.Oxy. 1241), which Murray had argued in a 2012 article was an parody of an ancient grammarian's notes, and not to be taken as serious ancient scholarship.

External links

• Anchored in Time Lecture for the New York Classical Club
• BBC Radio 4, 'Detoxifying Classics', with Katherine Harloe: Detoxifying the Classics - BBC Sounds
• CHS Argonautica Reading with Jackie Murray
• John P. Birkelund Lecture: The Idea and Image of Slavery in Plato’s Phaedo