Brian Phillips Murphy

Brian Phillips Murphy is Associate Professor in the History Department. His research is about the political economy of state-directed economic development, banking, and corporate chartering in the early American republic. At Rutgers he leads a project documenting New Jersey’s 1947 state constitutional convention in partnership with the Quill Project at Pembroke College, University of Oxford. He is a faculty affiliate of the Rutgers University Center for State Constitutional Studies and a founding co-director of the Mediterranean Displacements Project. In 2023-2024 he is the Helen and Robert Appel Fellow in History and Technology at the New-York Historical Society. He is is the author of Building the Empire State: Political Economy in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), which shared the James A. Broussard Best First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. He is the director of a curricular initiative “Climate of American Constitutional Democracy” project which won a planning grant from the Teagle Foundation and resulted in a new partnership with the Quill Project at Pembroke College, Oxford.