Prof. Brian Phillips Murphy is Associate Professor of History in the Department of History and Program in American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of the award-winning book Building the Empire State: Political Economy in Early America. He is currently writing a book about the 1792 founding of Paterson, New Jersey as the first federally-planned industrial town in the early United States.

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He regularly writes for public audiences and has been published in Vanity Fair, Politico, the Nation, and BusinessWeek. He has extensive experience in broadcast media and was a Contributor at MSNBC and a contributing editor at Talking Points Memo.

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He has held major national fellowships as the Fulbright Chair in American History at University College Dublin, and as a fellow at the New-York Historical Society, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, and the George Washington Library at Mount Vernon.

 

At Rutgers he is leading a project in collaboration with the Quill Project at Pembroke College, University of Oxford, to document the 1947 state constitutional convention that drafted New Jersey's current state constitution. He is also the founder of an interdisciplinary seminar on state constitutional studies called the State Constitutions Lab.

 

Prof. Murphy's scholarship about the history of corporations has been cited in Congress and the federal courts ​and he has consulted on legal proceedings related to this work.