Position: Associate Professor
Field: Cultural, Political, Social, Urban, Women & Gender
Region: Latin America & Caribbean
Office: 314 Old Horticulture
Office Hours: Wednesday 2:30-4:30
Email: murph367@msu.edu
Phone: (517) 884-4943
My research and teaching explore themes of mass urbanization, inequality, domesticity, state formation, and political economy, with a particular focus on the property regimes of low-income groups. While rooted in the concerns and approaches of Latin American historiography, I also draw on the perspectives of other disciplines, especially anthropology. I have primarily focused on Chilean history since the 1950s, but I have also produced scholarship on Guatemala. In 2004, I published a book of collaborative oral histories in Santiago, Chile, Historias poblacionales: hacia una memoria incluyente. I have also been the lead editor of two volumes, the first on work at the intersections of anthropology and history and the second on modern urban housing regimes in global perspective from the mid-twentieth century to the present. I published For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile in early 2015.
Selected publications:
For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile, 1960-2010
The Housing Question: Tensions, Continuities, and Contingencies in the Modern City
Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline
Courses taught:
IAH 203: Latin America and the World: Tensions of Empire and Nation
HST 381: Latin America: The National Period
HST 486: The Latin American City and Its Discontents
HST 486: Rethinking the Cold War from Las Américas
HST 850/GUSP 850: The City and Its Discontents: Rethinking Marginality in Modern Urban Society
ANP 810/HST 810: Anthrohistory: Exploring the Crossroads of Anthropology and History