Don't Say His Name

Cailín Murray is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. She received her MA and PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Washington in 2001. In 2004 she completed a two-year Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and joined the Ball State faculty. Dr. Murray is an environmental ethnohistorian who studies Indigenous knowledge systems, settler colonialism, and the transformation of historical landscapes. She is particularly interested in how folklore, cultural memory, history, and foodways have informed how landscapes were used in the past and continue to construct and sustain attachments to place in the present. She regularly teaches an undergraduate course about monsters and culture. Dr. Murray has conducted ethnographic and ethnohistorical research primarily along the central Northwest Coast. She is currently researching twentieth-century witch accusations in the US and settler colonialism, religious beliefs, and historical gardening practices in the Great Lakes region. In 2019 she conducted preliminary research in Ireland and hopes to return there in order to explore Connemara’s shell fisheries. She has published in Ethnohistory and other scholarly journals and co-authored with Coll Thrush Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in Culture and History (Nebraska University Press, 2011).