Brian Murphy Email & Phone Number

I am a history professor at Rutgers-Newark and study early American political economy – the relationship between business, markets, government, law, partisanship, and politics. My current research is about the industrial development of the Passaic River in the New York-New Jersey estuarial region and how it relates to politics and ecology. This project is being supported by research fellowships I won in 2021 from both the Washington Library at Mount Vernon and the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello.In addition to scholarship and teaching, my career in higher education has been focused on collaboratively developing programming at public universities in two distinct areas: faculty-mentored undergraduate research opportunities, and accessible global education opportunities.I was on the faculty of Baruch College (CUNY) for eight years; while there I won a Whiting Foundation teaching award and was co-appointed to the Macaulay Honors College faculty. I joined Rutgers-Newark in 2016 to become Honors College director, which under my tenure had a phenomenally diverse cohort of commuter students from across the university. My team professionalized our operations and student advisement, convened a collaborative planning process to streamline our curriculum, and in 2018 created an office of competitive fellowships advising. I brought in faculty to help prepared Rhodes semi-finalists, consecutive Schwarzian winners, and our first undergraduate Fulbright winners in more than a decade. In 2020 I became director of a new curricular initiative to create an interdisciplinary minor program focused on studying the U.S. and state constitutions through the lens of climate change. This “Climate of American Constitutional Democracy” project won a planning grant from the Teagle Foundation in early 2020 and has already resulted in a new partnership with the Quill Project at Pembroke College, Oxford. Rutgers undergraduates are documenting the 1947 New Jersey state constitutional convention, an effort that will be useful to courts, legislators, and researchers. In 2021 I was the lead writer on a successful grant application to the U.S. Department of State’s IDEAS (Increase and Diversify Education Abroad for U.S. Students) capacity-building program. Our award will enable us to create a portfolio of faculty-led study abroad programs around the Mediterranean to complement curricular and scholarly activities being launched through a new initiative which I co-direct called the Mediterranean Displacements Project.

Listed skills include Finance, Budgets, Financial Analysis, Program Development, and 33 others.