Shortly after James Madison College alumnus Stephen O. Murray (’72) passed in 2019, his longtime partner Keelung Hong memorialized his life and scholarship by donating the single largest cash gift James Madison and MSU Libraries have received, thereby creating the Stephen O. Murray Scholar in Residence Endowment and Stephen O. Murray and Keelung Hong Special Collections.
Matthew Andler is the 2022-23 Stephen O. Murray Scholar in Residence, marking the program’s second scholar to assume the role. He earned a Master of Science in sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Virginia.
The scholar in residence program encourages LGBTQ+ scholarship by providing academics access to archives located in the Stephen O. Murray and Keelung Hong Special Collections and by supporting their engagement with the college community through public lectures and workshops. Andler specializes in LGBTQIA+ philosophy and has presented widely on topics including gender and sexual identity, historic gay and lesbian neighborhoods and conceptual engineering.
Andler’s academic home is in the discipline of philosophy, and he is excited to have the resources and platform provided by the Stephen O. Murray residency to “pursue queer scholarship on queer terms.”
His first visit to campus, September 22-28, will include familiarizing himself with the archives and delivering a lecture titled “Kinship and Demarcation.”
“I believe that philosophy is everywhere, and I’m especially interested in the concepts and ideals that are embedded in queer ways of life. In much of my research, I aim to formalize these concepts and ideals into philosophical systems.”