Professor Emeritus of French
Jack Murray (1930–2025) was born at the start of the Great Depression, but thanks to a love of reading, he became the first in his family to attend college. He earned a BA in French from Wesleyan University in 1952, an MA from the University of Grenoble in 1953, and a PhD from Yale in 1957. In 1960 he was hired as an Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian at UC Santa Barbara, where he remained until retirement in 1992.
Jack’s research and teaching focused on twentieth-century French literature, particularly the works of Marcel Proust. He published two books on Proust: The Proustian Comedy (York, SC: French Literature Publications, 1980) and Landscapes of Alienation and the Proustian Comedy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). Jack was a beloved teacher and stalwart colleague. He taught a very popular undergraduate course on existentialism, which was always filled to capacity, in addition to graduate seminars on Proust and other topics relating to twentieth-century French literature.
Jack was an avid outdoorsman, who enjoyed hiking and backpacking, both on the local trails and in the Sierras.