I grew up in Dublin and studied at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford before completing my PhD at King’s in 2011. From 2012 to 2015, I was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Cambridge University, where I worked with ten other scholars on a collaborative interdisciplinary project, ‘The Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth Century Culture’. I returned to King’s in 2015.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Victorian literature and culture
• Travel writing and empire
• Literature, music and religion
• The biblical and classical past in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland

My forthcoming monograph on H.M. Stanley and his African collaborators investigates the ways in which the literature of exploration engaged with narratives of modernity and progress in the late nineteenth century. A new project, Victoria’s Martyrs: Modern Lives and Ancient Forms, 1840–1918, examines the persistence of martyrology as a literary and visual form (in historical novels, paintings, sermons, hymns, stained glass and life writing). We know the Victorians were relentless historicizers, but the figure of the martyr threatened to absorb the contingent events of linear history into a cyclical rhythm of devotional time.

I welcome applications from PhD students with interests in any of my areas of research. I have recently supervised projects on nineteenth-century women and horses; literature and Victorian waterways; Robert Louis Stevenson and Japan; and Victorian debates about the value and utility of literature.

For more details, please see Brian's full research profile.

Teaching

I teach Victorian and nineteenth-century British and Irish literature with a specific focus on Charles Dickens, nineteenth-century pasts, and the literature of islands and islanders.

Expertise and public engagement

I am co-founder and director of the Bear Yard Press, a historical printing press and research/teaching hub for Print and Book History at King’s College London. I use the press to collaborate with visual artists, scholars, and printmakers and I also enjoy giving public talks and walking tours on the literary, cultural and architectural history of nineteenth-century London. 

Selected publications

• ‘Staging Exploration: Kalulu, Kadu and the Lectures of H.M. Stanley’, Victorian Studies, 67.3 (2025)
• Scripture and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. by James Grande & Brian Murray (Bloomsbury, 2023)
• Chosen Peoples: The Bible, Race and Empire in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. by Gareth Atkins, Shinjini Das, & Brian Murray (Manchester University Press, 2020)
• ‘The Battle for St Peter’s Chair: Mediating the Materials of Catholic Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Word and Image, 33.3 (2017)
• Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form, 1760–1900, ed. by Mary Henes & Brian Murray (Palgrave, 2015)