Murray Smith is Professor of Philosophy, Art and Film at the University of Kent (since 2000) and co-director of the Aesthetics Research Centre. He is also past President of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image and has served as Director of Research in the Faculty of Humanities (2008) and held the roles of Head of Film Studies (1999-2003 and 2007-8), Director of Research for Drama, Film and Visual Arts (2001-4) and Leverhulme Research Fellow (2005-6).
His first degree was in English Language and Literature at the University of Liverpool; subsequently he gained an MA and PhD in Film Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, under the supervision of David Bordwell. He is a member of the advisory editorial board of Screen; a corresponding editor for Northern Lights, the yearbook for the Film and Media Studies department of the University of Copenhagen; and a member of the editorial board of Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image. From 2002-6 he was an editor of Film Studies: An International Review, and from 2003-7 a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council College of Peers. He has published widely on Film, Art and Aesthetics. A new addition of his 1995 landmark work in philosophy and film Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema has been released from Oxford University Press (2022); other publications include Film, Art, and the Third Culture (OUP); Trainspotting (BFI); Film Theory and Philosophy (co-edited with Richard Allen) (OUP); Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (co-edited with Steve Neale) (Routledge); and Thinking through Cinema (co-edited with Tom Wartenberg) (Blackwell).