Kaitlin M. Murphy works at the intersection of art and politics with particular interest in memory, social justice, place, and public thought. She is Chair and Director of Graduate Studies in the Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory graduate interdisciplinary program, Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and affiliate faculty in the School of Art, Human Rights Practice graduate program, and Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona.

Murphy is the author of Mapping Memory: Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americas (Fordham UP), which interweaves visual and performance theory with memory and affect studies to theorize memory mapping as a visual and spatial strategy that has emerged in opposition to political discourses and visual economies that overlook certain subjects and human rights abuses. Her writing can also be found in Genocide Studies and Prevention, TDR: The Drama Review, Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Journal of Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, Human Rights Review, in various anthologies, and elsewhere. She is currently co-editing the Memory Activism Handbook and the journal special issue “Creative Interference,” which explores the interventionist and reparative labor of artists in neoliberal cultures of violence and corruption, environmental catastrophe, the global refugee crisis, and other ongoing processes of devastation. She is also currently at work on a book-length project about the performativity of monuments.

In addition to her academic work, Murphy works as a consultant in both English and Spanish in a range of areas, including the arts, civil and human rights, transitional justice and community-based reconciliation and post-conflict reconstruction. She is a lifelong dancer and visual artist and loves curating exhibitions and making, seeing, and talking about art. Murphy received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies and MA in Visual Culture, both from New York University. She is currently completing an executive education program in Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School.