Brian Michael Murphy
Brian Michael Murphy is Chair and Associate Professor of American Studies at Williams College and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. His book We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World (University of North Carolina Press, 2022) received the 2025 Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and the 2024 Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize from the New England American Studies Association, and was published in paperback in early 2026. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Kenyon Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Lapham’s Quarterly, IGN, and in Italian translation in Ácoma, among other places. A Fulbright Scholar, his work has also received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Vermont Arts Council. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Studies from The Ohio State University, where he was a Presidential Fellow. Formerly the Managing and Nonfiction Editor at Northwest Review, he co-edited the folio on "Writing from Rural Spaces" for The Kenyon Review. Most recently, his essay “Wake Up the Dead” was commissioned for the program of Deep Azure, a hip hop play written by the late Chadwick Boseman and performed at Shakespeare’s Globe in London.
