Stephen Murray (born 1945) is an architectural historian, specialising in Romanesque and Gothic architecture. Before his retirement, Murray was a Lisa and Bernard Selz Professor of Medieval Art History Emeritus at Columbia University. He has written several “ground-breaking monographs” on French Gothic cathedrals, especially Troyes, Beauvais, and Amiens, that combine analysis of architectural details with discussion of medieval writing about cathedrals. He is considered a pioneer in the development of digital media and visual arts resources for educational use.
Table of Contents
- 1 Career
- 1.1 Projects
- 1.2 Awards
- 1.3 Staying Strong: An Immensely Human Story
- 1.4 Murder Aboard the Queen Elizabeth II
- 1.5 Notre-Dame of Amiens: Life of the Gothic Cathedral (Columbiana)
- 1.6 The Battle over Peleliu: Islander, Japanese, and American Memories of War (War, Memory, and Culture)
- 1.7 2 Gesänge, Op. 91: No. 2, Geistliches Wiegenlied, "Die ihr schwebet um diese Palmen" (Andante con moto)
- 1.8 Pacific Homosexualities
- 1.9 Who Would Have Guessed?
- 1.10 Four Women
- 1.11 Groundhog Day (15th Anniversary Edition) [Blu-ray]
- 1.12 Outerstuff NBA Youth Performance Game Time Team Color Player Name and Number Jersey T-Shirt (Stephen Curry, X-Large (18/20))
Career
Murray began his teaching career at Morley College, London in 1969. Before joining Columbia in 1986, he held numerous posts at Indiana University, eventually appointed as the founding director the university’s School of Fine Art. He was moreover a visiting professor at Harvard University. At Columbia, Murray was a Lisa and Bernard Selz Professor of Medieval Art History Emeritus. He in addition to served as the director of graduate studies of the Department of Art History and Archaeology along with 1989 and 1992. In 1995, Murray founded the Visual Media Center (now the Media Center for Art History[n 1]) and was its Executive Director until 1999. Murray is now retired from teaching.
Projects
During the 1990s, Amiens Cathedral was studied by “virtually all student […] as a allocation of their Art Humanities curriculum” at Columbia. When Murray began teaching at there, the nonexistence of welcoming visual resources for teaching and studying the Cathedral led him to create the Amiens Cathedral Imaging Project.[n 2] It was the inaugural project for the Visual Media Center, both of which were supported considering a funding from the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH). The multimedia website consisted of computer-generated images and animations, drawings, and photographs of the Cathedral. The website moreover contained recreations of the Medieval composer Perotin’s music, primary documents united with the Cathedral, supplemented by secondary recommendation from Murray’s own monograph.
After the finishing of the Amiens Project, the Media Center launched the History of Architecture website, which built upon Murray’s project. The website is a database of visual images, in the format of QuickTime VR panoramas (‘nodes’) of various buildings from across the world, representing a broad range of architectural styles. The aim of the project was to pay for digital resources for teaching architectural archives in American schools. The project was funded by the NEH, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Office of the Provost at Columbia University.
In 2008, Murray and Andrew Tallon led the Mapping Gothic France project, funded by a four-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The website is a database of on summit of 30,000 digital images, covering 200 Gothic cathedrals in France and England. Other features tote up plans, elevations, history, and bibliography combined to each individual buildings. As of 2017, funding for the project had curtains and some of the website’s content remained incomplete.
Photographs taken by Murray are held in the Courtauld Institute of Arts’ Conway Library of art and architecture, and, as of 2017, are monster digitised.
Awards
Throughout his career, Murray has received many honours and awards for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988. In 1992, he was appointed by the French Ministry of Culture in the scientific committee to oversee the restoration of Amiens Cathedral.
In January 2020, Murray conventional an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Picardy, Jules Verne. He is also an honorary citizen of Amiens.
Last update 2021-08-06