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 Freedomville: The Story of a 21st Century Slave Revolt (Columbia Global Reports, 2021), 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). She is also editor of the Cambridge Companion to Slavery and Global Literature (Cambridge UP, 2022).

Her research team has published a series of reports and evidence briefs about the Chinese government's 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, including those attached to the solar, apparel, chemicals/plastics, automotive, and critical minerals sectors. She has provided expert testimony and evidence on the crisis in the Uyghur Region to the U.S., U.K., E.U., and Australian governments, as well as provided private briefings to government agencies, advocacy groups, law firms, and others interested in the issue globally.

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 has consulted for the World Health Organization, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Office of Victims of Crime, and the National Human Trafficking Training and Technical Assistance Center, as well as other government agencies, workers unions, investor groups, law firms, and advocacy groups.

Teaching

Sheffield Institute of Law and Justice

College of Social Sciences and Arts

Research

Professor Murphy is currently investigating supply chains linked to forced labour in the Uyghur Region. She provides technical assistance based on that research to non-profits and government agencies that are working to address the crisis in the Uyghur Region or forced labor more broadly.

Link 1 https://www.shu.ac.uk/helena-kennedy-centre-international-justice/research-and-projects/all-projects/forced-labour-lab

Link 2 https://www.shu.ac.uk/helena-kennedy-centre-international-justice/research-and-projects/all-projects/driving-force

Link 3 https://www.shu.ac.uk/helena-kennedy-centre-international-justice/research-and-projects/all-projects/in-broad-daylight

Link 4 https://www.shu.ac.uk/helena-kennedy-centre-international-justice/research-and-projects/all-projects/laundered-cotton

Link 5 https://www.shu.ac.uk/helena-kennedy-centre-international-justice/research-and-projects/all-projects/financing-and-genocide

Link 6 https://www.shu.ac.uk/helena-kennedy-centre-international-justice/research-and-projects/all-projects/built-on-repression

Publications

Journal articles

Murphy, L. (2024). The Blood-Stained-Gate: An Archive of Emotion and Authenticity in the New Slave Narrative. Comparative Literary Histories of Slavery, XXXVI (XXXVI), 307-323. http://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxvi.17mur

Geller, P., Murphy, L.T., Stoklosa, H., Bartovic, J., Halldorsson, H., Wolf, M., & Aguirre, I.Y. (2023). Health workers are in a unique position to help identify human trafficking. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 382, 1745. http://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.p1745

Verschuuren, M., Geller, P., Murphy, L.T., Stoklosa, H., Bartovic, J., Halldorsson, H., ... Barnhoorn, F. (2023). European public health news. European journal of public health, 33 (2), 349-351. http://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckad033

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 & 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), 52-71. http://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.0.0014

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

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).