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 currently serves as President of the American Religion and Literature Society.
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.
