Theresa Murray's undergraduate degree was multidisciplinary, where she studied the human mind through philosophy, cognitive science, folklore, and religion. Those studies introduced her to cognitive anthropology, and the study of how language affects culture, and how culture affects language.

Ms. Murray shifted to linguistic anthropology in her Master's studies, and her research focused on conceptual metaphor in political speech. Additionally, her graduate studies took a "four-field approach," which provided many opportunities to study and explore the human condition, including the use of applied anthropology research. She is fascinated with human ingenuity and the intelligence that living cultures, and cultures of the past, reveal, and this comes through in her teaching, be it about human evolution, living cultures, or language use.