Brian Michael Murphy is a writer, professor, and media archaeologist whose work cuts across disciplines and genres.
His book, We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World (University of North Carolina Press, 2022; paperback 2026), received both the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and the Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize from the New England American Studies Association. He is Chair and Associate Professor of American Studies, and a Faculty Affiliate in Africana Studies at Williams College. His recent work includes "How I Learned to Stop Teaching and Love AI," which appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, as well as an essay 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.
His writing has also been published in the Wall Street Journal, The Kenyon Review, Lapham’s Quarterly, IGN, in Italian translation in Ácoma, and in the edited volume The Expanded Field of Conservation (Clark Art Institute/Yale University Press). A first-generation college graduate, he earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Studies, a radically interdisciplinary department in the College of Arts & Sciences at The Ohio State University, where he was a Presidential Fellow. Prior to Williams, he taught at Bennington College, where he also served as Dean of the College, and at “L’Orientale” in Naples, Italy as a Fulbright Scholar. For over a decade, he had the great privilege of teaching in, and eventually directing, the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop, a summer residential program for high school students. For the past few years, he has been researching and writing about the UFC—its strategic use of immersive technology and live spectacle, its relation to the longer history of wonder and power, and its particular way of engaging politics, race, culture, technology, and finance to build a new kind of empire.