Michael Murrin, the Raymond W. & Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of English, Department of Comparative Literature, and Divinity School, passed away July 27, 2021. He was 83.

Professor Murrin's research interests lay in two areas: the history of criticism, with a specialty in the history of allegorical interpretation, and the study of the genres of romance and epic. His teaching focused on period courses in the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the early modern period. His publications included The Veil of Allegory; The Allegorical Epic; and History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic. In 2016 Professor Murrin was the recipient of the Norman McLean Faculty Award, which honors emeritus or very senior UChicago faculty for extraordinary contributions to teaching and to the student experience of life within the University community. 

His work Trade and Romance (University of Chicago Press, 2013) a study of the two intertwined themes of the growth of Europe's middle-class culture and its interests in aristocratic romance, and the simultaneous development of trade across Asia conducted by merchants and initially made possible by the Mongol world system, won the Rene Wellek prize, the highest prize in the ACLA. The book is a study of the imagination and attitudes that affect thinking about Asia to this day.

Professor Murrin was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His latest project was a short book about Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

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NB: the description above was based on Professor Murrin's faculty biography at the Divinity School.