Laura Murphy

About

Laura T. Murphy is Professor of Human Rights and Contemporary Slavery at the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University (UK). She has been the recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, a British Academy Visiting Fellow, and the John G. Medlin Fellow at the National Humanities Center.

She is the author of The New Slave Narrative: The Battle over Representations of Contemporary Slavery (Columbia University Press, 2019), editor of Survivors of Slavery: Modern-Day Slave Narratives (Columbia University Press, 2014), and author of Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature (Ohio University Press, 2012). Her latest book, Freedomville: The Story of a 21at Century Slave Revolt will be released by Columbia Global Reports in late 2021. Professor Murphy’s research is broadly interested in forced labour globally, with a particular interest in survivor narratives and first-person testimony.

She is currently working on several research projects about the Chinese governments intertwined systems of internment and forced labour that has been inflicted on the people of the Uyghur Region. The work investigates the international supply chains that have ties to those repressive systems. She has previously conducted research on forced labour in India, Nigeria, Ghana, the United States, and Canada.

She has recently been part of a team that created Core Competencies for medical professionals addressing human trafficking in healthcare settings with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Her previous research on the intersection of homeless youth and human trafficking in the US and Canada provided a four-pronged victim-centered community blueprint for how service providers can best assist youth at risk of trafficking, based on interviews with over 600 homeless youth in the U.S. and Canada. She serves as a subject matter expert in the field of human trafficking for the U.S. Office of Victims of Crime and the Administration of Children and Families.

She is also the chair of the research committee of HEAL, an organization dedicated to providing a public health lens to the field of human trafficking.

In addition to her academic presentations, she is a sought-after trainer and public speaker who has educated and motivated community activists, students, law enforcement officers, service providers, and medical professionals to employ a trauma-informed response to serve the needs of survivors of trafficking and contemporary slavery. As a consultant, she provides stakeholders assistance with community-based research, curriculum design, evaluations, and awareness projects in the field of modern slavery, human trafficking, and other social justice issues.

Research

Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice

Professor Murphy is currently investigating supply chains linked to forced labour in the Uyghur Region. She also has a forthcoming book on bonded labour in India.

Publications

Journal articles

Greenbaum, J., Stoklosa, H., & Murphy, L. (2020). The Public Health Impact of Coronavirus Disease on Human Trafficking. Frontiers in Public Health, 8, 561184. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2020.561184

Bales, K., Murphy, L., & Silverman, B.W. (2019). How many trafficked people are there in Greater New Orleans? lessons in measurement. Journal of Human Trafficking. http://doi.org/10.1080/23322705.2019.1634936

de Bruijn, E., & Murphy, L. (2018). Trading in innocence: slave-shaming in Ghanaian children’s market fiction. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 30 (3), 243-262. http://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2017.1321982

Murphy, L.T. (2018). On Freedom and Complexity in the (Captive) Nation. JALA: Journal of the African Literature Association, 12 (1), 60-71. http://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2018.1433753

Murphy, L. (2018). Anti-trafficking’s Sensational Misinformation: The “72-hour Myth” and America’s Homeless Youth. Journal of Human Trafficking, 4 (1), 89-91. http://doi.org/10.1080/23322705.2018.1423450

Murphy, L. (2017). The ethics of African studies in the age of oga politics: A response to Tejumola Olaniyan’s “African literature in the post-global age”. Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 4 (2), 286-295. http://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2017.9

Ngugi, M.W., & Murphy, L.T. (2017). This hustle is not your Grandpa's African lit. New Orleans Review, 2017-January (43), 1-4.

Ngugi, M.W., & Murphy, L. (2017). This hustle is not your Grandpa's African lit. New Orleans Review, 2017-J (43), 1-4. https://www.neworleansreview.org/43-2017/

Murphy, L.T. (2015). The new slave narrative and the illegibility of modern slavery. Slavery and Abolition, 36 (2), 382-405. http://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2014.977528

Murphy, L.T. (2015). Blackface abolition and the new slave narrative. Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2 (1), 93-113. http://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2014.32

Murphy, L. (2014). Narrating "white slavery!" in The Wire: A generic genealogy. Genre, 47 (2), 111-140. http://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-2679752

Murphy, L. (2009). Obstacles in the way of love: The enslavement of intimacy in Samuel Crowther and Ama Ata Aidoo. Research in African Literatures, 40 (4), 47-64. http://doi.org/10.2979/RAL.2009.40.4.47

Murphy, L. (2008). The curse of constant remembrance: The belated trauma of the slave trade in ayi kwei armah's fragments. Studies in the Novel, 40 (1-2), 52-71.

Murphy, L. (2007). Into the bush of ghosts: Specters of the slave trade in West African fiction. Research in African Literatures, 38 (4), 141-152. http://doi.org/10.2979/RAL.2007.38.4.141

Murphy, L. (n.d.). The Blood-Stained-Gate: An Archive of Emotion and Authenticity in the New Slave Narrative. Comparative Literary Histories of Slavery.

Book chapters

Murphy, L. (2022). “Slavery: The 21st Century Global Slave Narrative Trade”. In Evans, J. (Ed.) Globalization and Literary Studies. (pp. 294-304). Cambridge University Press: http://doi.org/10.1017/9781108887915.019

Rood, C., Richard, S., Murphy, L., Einbond, J., Iannarone, A., Amato, A., & Lee, H. (2020). Adolescents and Labor Trafficking. In Titchen, K.E., & Miller, E. (Eds.) Medical Perspectives on Human Trafficking in Adolescents A Case-Based Guide. (pp. 69-112). Springer Nature: http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43367-3_5

Murphy, L.T. (2015). The Reemergence of the Slave Narrative Tradition and the Search for a New Frederick Douglass. In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights. (pp. 125-134). Abingdon, England: Routledge

Murphy, L.T. (2015). The reemergence of the slave narrative tradition and the search for a new Frederick Douglass. In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights. (pp. 126-135).