Kaitlin M. Murphy
Visiting Scholar, Department of Sociology
Dr. Kaitlin M. Murphy (Ph.D. New York University, 2013) is an interdisciplinary scholar, writer, and curator focused on memory, culture, and politics.
She is currently at work on two new book projects. The first (nonfiction) examines the relationship between memory and democracy and explores how public memory interventions aim to reframe our understanding of the lived experience, legacies, and future histories of racialized, gendered violence. The second (fiction) is a novel focused on the lives of those who live, and what it means to carve new futures amidst the ruins of history.
She is the author of Mapping Memory: Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americas (2019), and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism (2023). Her writing can also be found in Memory Studies, Genocide Studies and Prevention, TDR: The Drama Review, Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Journal of Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, Human Rights Review, in various anthologies, and elsewhere.
She is an Associate Professor of Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory and Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona, where she is also Affiliate Faculty in the School of Art and the Human Rights Practice Program.
For the 2026-2027 academic year, she is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia.