Brian Michael Murphy is Chair and Associate Professor of American Studies at Williams College. His book, We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World (University of North Carolina Press), 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.
His writings appear or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Wall Street Journal, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Lapham’s Quarterly, IGN, and elsewhere. A Fulbright Scholar, his work has also been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vermont Arts Council, and the Ohio Arts Council. He earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Studies, a radically interdisciplinary department at The Ohio State University, where he was a Presidential Fellow. Previously, he was the Managing and Nonfiction Editor of Northwest Review, and co-edited a Media-N special issue on the “Afterlives of Data,” as well as a folio on “Writing from Rural Spaces” for the Kenyon Review.
Prior to Williams, he taught at Miami University, as well as at Bennington College, where he also served as Dean of the College. 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.