Faculty Profile

Dr. Murphy joined the Merrimack Women’s Studies community in the spring of 2002. Currently she is a full-time asst. professor of Political Science at Salem State College in addition to teaching part-time here at Merrimack College. She also served as a Visiting Professor of Ethnic Studies at Metropolitan State University in Minnesota during the 2005/2006 academic year.

In addition to teaching “Gender and Society”, Dr. Murphy has created and taught four new classes.

• Forgotten Histories of American Women of Color: Culture and Politics
• Exploring Gender in Native American Novels
• Women in Historic Massachusetts
• Unmasking Pocahontas: Native American Women from Myth – Reality

She received her Ph.D. in Women’s Studies in 2007 from Clark University. Her dissertation, Dissent along the Borders of the Fourth World: Native American Writings as Social Protest, creates a paradigm for understanding Indigenous people as Fourth World and situates Native American women’s literature as social protest writing within that framework as being social protest writing, her dissertation joins the growing body of Indigenous literary analysis that seeks to further “intellectual sovereignty.” More specifically, it explores the meanings of “survivance” and “communitism” as forms of literary activism and how these are manifested in Indigenous literature and shape a tradition of literary resistance. Her dissertation focuses on literature by Indigenous women as they offer a gendered view of Fourth World colonization illuminating both colonial occupation and distinctive forms of Indigenous cultural resistance. She employs a lens she has crafted that looks at these women, specifically mixedbloods as “accidental tricksters” who move within the border spaces between the First and Fourth Worlds.