Michelle Murphy
Categories: Advisory Board
Michelle Murphy is a professor of women and gender studies at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include the history of technoscience, sex, gender, race, environmental politics and capitalism in the United States and in transnational and postcolonial theoretical perspectives. She earned a BA and PhD (Harvard), and held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute, Berlin. Her doctoral dissertation on Sick Building Syndrome culminated in the book “Sick Building Syndrome and the Politics of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience and Women Workers (Duke University Press, 2006), which examines the production of uncertainty in environmental politics in the context of the emergence of new racialized and gendered workplaces and new epistemological and political contestations over the existence of pervasive chemical exposures in twentieth century United States. She is presently finishing a book called “Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Technology, Feminist Health, and Biopolitics in the Age of American Empire”. Other publications include the “Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments (2004)”, which she co-edited, as well as articles in such journals as Configurations, Labor History, Feminist Studies, Osiris, and edited collections. As well, Professor Murphy is the editor of RaceSci, a website dedicated to the critical study of the concept of race in the history science, medicine, and technology (www.racesci.org). and she co-organized a meeting series at The Women and Gender Studies Institute titled “Biopolitics + Technoscience” in 2006. Her newest project, The Economization of Life, concerns the history of cold-war American imperial projects linking fertility, capitalist development, and environment, with a particular focus on Bangladesh. Through 2008, Professor Murphy is a Senior Research Fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University.
