Craig N. Murphy

Craig N. Murphy is M. Margaret Ball Professor of International Relations at Wellesley College where he teaches courses in comparative politics, international relations, north/south relations and peace studies. He also works for the United Nations Development Programme as its historian.

Professor Murphy did his undergraduate work at Grinnell College in Iowa, the Commonwealth Institute in London, and the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. He did his graduate work at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the Canadian Peace Research Institute.

After joining the Wellesley faculty in 1981, Murphy served as director of the Peace Studies program from 1987–89, a role he again filled in 2004. He directed or co-directed the college’s International Relations Program (1990–2000), served as Chair of Political Science (1999–2002), and as Director of the Social Sciences (2002–04). Before coming to Wellesley, Murphy was an instructor at Wesleyan University, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, and later served as a visiting professor at both Harvard’s Government Department (1990) and Brown’s Watson Institute for International Studies (1998–2002). He has overseen post-doctoral students from Colombia, Japan, and Turkey; served on doctoral committees of students at universities in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States and has served on visiting committees at a number of institutions, including Haverford, Middlebury, Mount Holyoke, Tufts, and Williams.

Murphy’s research focuses on international institutions and the political economy of inequality across lines of gender, class, ethnicity, race, and geography. His book The United Nations Development Programme: A Better Way? (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is a critical history of the UN’s efforts in the developing world that drew on hundreds of interviews and archival work in more than thirty countries. Another major study, International Organization and Industrial Change: Global Governance since 1850 (Polity Press and Oxford University Press, 1994), explores the impact of global-level international agencies on the world economy. Other recent books include Global Institutions, Marginalization, and Development (Routledge, 2004) and edited volumes Egalitarian Politics in an Age of Globalization (Palgrave, 2002) and International Relations and the New Inequality (with Mustapha Kamal Pasha, Blackwell, 2002).

Murphy is the author, co-author, or co-editor of three earlier books as well as special issues of the journals Development and Review of International Political Economy. His articles have appeared in many policy and scholarly journals, including Contemporary Security Policy, The Democratic Leaders of the Asia-Pacific Forum, International Affairs, International Interactions, International Organization, International Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly, Millennium, New Political Economy, Polity, and TransAfrica Forum.

He was a founding editor of the international public policy journal, Global Governance, which received the 1996 award of the American Association of Publishers for the best new journal in the social sciences, management, and the humanities. He has served as president of the International Studies Association (2000–01), the professional association of scholars of international relations, and as chair of the Academic Council on the UN System (2002–04).

Murphy is married to JoAnne Yates, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management at MIT’s Alfred P. Sloan School. Recently they began their first scholarly collaboration—a study of the setting of industrial and work standards over the last century, in the US and globally. They are active members of a running club, Eden Athletics, and share interests in roots music and the international arts and crafts movements of the early 20th century. They live in Watertown, Massachusetts and Salisbury Cove, Maine with two cats.

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Profile last updated: 11/06