Ray Horton is associate professor of English at Murray State University. He studied English at Mercyhurst University (BA) and Case Western Reserve University (MA and PhD). His teaching has been recognized with the 2023 Kentucky Council of Teachers of English (KCTE/LA) “College Teacher of the Year” award and a 2022 Murray State University Board of Regents Teaching Excellence Award, and his writing has been published in PMLA, Christianity & Literature, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, and Post45. He has served as President and Treasurer of the American Religion and Literature Society, and he currently serves as co-coordinator of Murray State’s undergraduate literature program and as Vice President of Murray State’s Gender Equity Caucus.
A scholar of American literature, secularization, and literature and religion, Horton’s current book project is titled American Fiction’s Secular Faith. Spanning the end of the nineteenth century to the present, it examines American novelists, from Mark Twain and Willa Cather to Toni Morrison and Marilynne Robinson, who represent forms of religious experience as models of aesthetic attention. He regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in post-1865 American literature, general education courses in humanities and composition, and interdisciplinary summer courses for the Commonwealth Honors Academy at Murray State University.
Horton lives in Murray, KY with his wife Erin and his daughters Emersyn and Avery. Outside his academic work, he enjoys playing the drums, watching Cleveland Guardians baseball games, volunteering at St. John’s Episcopal Church, unionizing his workplace, and zipping around town with his kids on the back of his new e-bike.
