Kaitlin M. Murphy is an interdisciplinary researcher, professor, artist, and consultant. Her research focuses on culture and politics, with particular interest in intersections between human rights, atrocity prevention, memory, the arts, and public thought.
She received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies and M.A. in Visual Culture, both from New York University. She has published articles in Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Journal of Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, and Human Rights Review, and has written chapters for several edited volumes, including Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter. Her book, Mapping Memory: Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americas, was released with Fordham University Press in Fall 2018.
Murphy is currently chair of the Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory Graduate Interdisciplinary Program, associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, faculty in the Human Rights Practice graduate program, and affiliated faculty in Latin American Studies and the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona. She is on the Executive Committee of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, where she co-leads the subcommittee on Pedagogy in developing initiatives that intersect digital media, pedagogy, performance and politics. She is also a committee member of the Hemispheric Studies Forum of the Modern Languages Association, and co-chair of the Memory and Trauma working group of the Memory Studies Association.
In addition to her academic work, Murphy works as a consultant in a range of areas, including as a freelance researcher, editor, and writer, leading workshops and trainings, and in program evaluation and development.
Prior to joining academia, Murphy worked in public policy. She was program director at Performing Arts Workshop, a Bay Area nonprofit helping young people develop critical thinking, creative expression, and essential learning skills through the arts, and program specialist at the National Economic Development and Law Center, a national research, consulting, and legal organization dedicated to building economic health in vulnerable communities.
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