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Dana Murphy

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Dana Murphy

Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English
B.A., University of California, Berkeley, 2011; M.A., University of California, Irvine, 2015; Ph.D., 2018. Caltech, 2021-.

Profile

Dr. Dana Elle Murphy is an academic and writer with research expertise in poetry and poetics, global cultures of writing, and literary histories of English in the Americas, Caribbean, and abroad, especially regarding Black and Latinx lives. As a literary critic, she is especially interested in historical and new methodologies around literary archival practices, expressive and material cultures, feminist writing, and crafts of writing broadly.

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. The book gathers several new archival discoveries interlacing Phillis with the tradition of literary criticism that would come to be known as Black feminist criticism. An earlier article version of this project was published in African American Review in 2020.

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 in 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" in 2026, a series edited by Janell Hobson for Ms. Magazine. At Caltech, Murphy teaches courses on American and diasporic literatures, and her pedagogy has been awarded commendation for "building greater inclusion and belonging into the undergraduate humanities curriculum."

Murphy was an Assistant Professor and LSA Collegiate Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She 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 earned her BA in English (magna cum laude) from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011.

Learn more about Murphy's research and writing at foremotherlove.com.

Research Summary
Diasporas of the Americas and Caribbean; Black and Latin American Study; Literatures and Cultures in English or English Translation; Poetry and Poetics; Gender and Women’s Studies; Environmental Humanities; Feminist Science and Technology Studies
Selected Awards
  • External Faculty Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford University, 2024–25
  • Appreciation Award, Caltech Center for Inclusion and Diversity (CCID), Caltech, 2024
  • Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF), Caltech English, 2010 (mentor: Kevin Gilmartin)
External Affiliations

Featured News

Dana Murphy's Foremother Love is Published by Duke University Press
December 02, 2025
Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English Dana Murphy is the author of a new book on Black feminist criticism.
A Conversation with Dana Murphy
November 08, 2021
Dana Murphy, assistant professor of English and Black Studies
Read more news

Selected Publications

Books

  • Foremother Love: Phillis Wheatley and Black Feminist Criticism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, July 2025. In Black Feminism on the Edge, a series edited by Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto.

Articles

  • "‘The Bark of Some Bush': Toward a Healing Bath in The History of Mary Prince." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 45, no. 1 (2026). Forthcoming.
  • "Imagining Black Steminist Care: Nnedi Okorafor's Binti." In "Black Women's Contemporary Speculative Fiction," edited by Susana M. Morris and Michelle M. Wright. Special issue of The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research 54, no. 2 (2024 [May]): 58–69.
  • "‘She Will Remember Everything': Black Diasporic Feminist Healing Roots in Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban." Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 12, no. 2 (2023 [Feb. 2024]): 5–27.
  • "Praisesong for Margaret Walker's Jubilee and the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival." African American Review 53, no. 4 (2020 [Apr. 2021]): 299–313.
  • "Black Feminist Hoodoo: Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo." In "‘sing a black girl's song…sing a song of her life': Ntozake Shange," edited by Trimiko Melancon. Special issue of CLA Journal 62, no. 2 (2019 [Feb. 2020]): 178–92.

Chapters & Essays

  • "Black Feminisms." In Phillis Wheatley (Peters) in Context, edited by April C. E. Langley and Wendy R. Roberts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026. Forthcoming. (invited)
  • "Reclaiming Phillis Wheatley (Peters): Imagination as a Feminist Founding Project." In "Founding Feminists," edited by Janell Hobson, Ms., 2026 [Mar.]. Online. (invited)

Poetry & Short Fiction

  • "Elegy in Purple." Poet Lore, no. 120, Summer/Fall 2025 [Dec.]. Print.
  • "Arachne." Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review, no. 31, 2025 [May], 39–40. Print.
  • "The Brown Cloth." Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora 50, no. 1, 2024 [Mar. 2025], 101–14. Print.

Reviews

  • Pitfalls of Prestige: Black Women and Literary Recognition, by Laura Elizabeth Vrana. The ALH Review, Spring 2026. Forthcoming. (invited)
  • Black Women and Energies of Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Haitian and American Literature, by Mary Grace Albanese. Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 42, no. 1 (2025 [Aug.]): 133–35. (invited)