Keeley McMurray

Keeley McMurray

Degree Program: MA

Graduation Year: 2020

Advisor: Michael J. Altman

Bio

From Huntsville, AL, Keeley McMurray graduated from the UA in 2018 with a BA in Religious Studies and English and a minor in Theater. She is primarily interested in how “religion” and its orbiting discourses can be studied as rhetoric, deployed as a tool used to organize and reproduce a specific social world. Specifically, she is curious as to how this rhetoric functions in American politics and law, as a necessary feature that works to negotiate similarity and difference by creating governable individuals. In 2018-19 Keeley held the prestigious National Alumni Association Graduate Fellowship and, in 2019-20, she was the inaugural holder of the American Examples Graduate Research Assistantship, funding by the Luce Foundation. After successfully defending her thesis and completing her MA degree, Keeley began a PhD at Florida State University but then decided instead to return to Hunstville and now works full-time at the University of Alabama at Hunstville as a member of their Development team.