Kathleen S. Murphy

Kathleen Murphy

Dean

College of Liberal Arts

 

Fields

  • Colonial America
  • Atlantic World
  • History of Science

Contact Information

Education

  • Johns Hopkins University, PhD
  • Johns Hopkins University, MA
  • University of Virginia, BA
     

Research and Teaching Interests

My areas of specialization are the history of science, slavery studies, the British Atlantic World, Early America, the history of collecting, and the legacies of slavery. I am particularly interested in the intersection of the history of science and the slave economy in the early modern Atlantic World. I have taught a range of undergraduate and graduate courses including on the history of colonial and revolutionary America, African American history, the Scientific Revolution, science in the Atlantic World, and science museums. 

My book, Captivity's Collections: Science, Natural History and the Transatlantic British Slave Trade(UNC Press 2023) argues that naturalists exploited the routes of the eighteenth-century British slave trade to obtain thousands of scientific specimens. By combining naturalists’ correspondence, scientific texts, and museum catalogs with the records of slave traders and slaving companies, it reveals the entangled histories of the British transatlantic slave trade and natural history. It chronicles how British slave ship surgeons, mariners, and slave traders obtained seeds, shells, pressed plants, preserved animals, fossils, and other natural historical specimens from West Africa, the Americas, and the Atlantic Ocean. Specimens acquired by means of the slave trade joined British museums, botanic gardens, and herbaria, were depicted in natural historical texts, and were discussed in the halls of scientific societies. I argue that collections of rare natural historical specimens and the scientific knowledge that resulted from their study should be counted among the profits extracted through the exploitations of the British slave trade.

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