Dr. Dana Elle Murphy is an academic and writer, with especial research expertise in poetry and poetics, global cultures of writing, and literary histories of English in the Americas, Caribbean, and abroad. She is especially interested in historical and new methodologies around literary archival practices, expressive and material cultures, and crafts of writing.

Murphy earned her doctorate in English from the University of California, Irvine in 2018, where she was the recipient of the John Hope Franklin Dissertation Fellowship from the American Philosophical Society and a WW Dissertation Fellowship in Women's Studies from the Institute for Citizens & Scholars. She was a postdoctoral fellow and assistant professor in the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor Department of English Language and Literature. She earned her BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011.

Murphy's academic book, Foremother Love: Phillis Wheatley and Black Feminist Criticism (Duke University Press, 2025), reads Phillis as a muse or "foremother" in both her eighteenth-century contexts and transhistorically with the traditions of later African American and Black diasporic literatures and cultures, especially with the tradition of literary criticism which would come to be known as Black feminist criticism. An earlier article version of this project was published in African American Review (2020).

Building on this research, Murphy is currently working on a new project focusing on global diasporas of the Caribbean, environmental humanities, and ethics of care. A new article on these subjects within the History of Mary Prince (1831) is forthcoming in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. A public essay on Phillis and global imagination was published in "Founding Feminists" (2026), a series edited by Janell Hobson for Ms. magazine.

Find links to more of Murphy's writing at foremotherlove.com.