Dana Murphy

Dana Murphy serves as Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) since 2021. She is currently on research leave for the 2025–26 academic year.

Education:

• B.A., University of California, Berkeley, 2011
• M.A., University of California, Irvine, 2015
• Ph.D., 2018

Research Focus: Professor Murphy's scholarship critically engages Black Study, Expressive Culture, and Literature in English or English Translation through interdisciplinary frameworks spanning Poetry and Poetics, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Feminist Science and Technology Studies. Her work examines historical and contemporary intersections of race, gender, and literary production, culminating in her monograph Foremother Love: Phillis Wheatley and Black Feminist Criticism (Duke University Press).

Awards and Honors:

• External Faculty Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Center (2024–25)
• Appreciation Award, Caltech Center for Inclusion and Diversity (2024)

Professor Murphy contributes to academic discourse as Editorial Board Member of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience and maintains active scholarly communication through her research portal foremotherlove.com.