Prof. Brian Phillips Murphy is a historian of early American political economy – the intersection of business, politics, law, and power.

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He is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark, where he has been teaching since 2016. He is on the faculties of the Program in American Studies, the Global Urban Studies program, and is a faculty affiliate of the Center for the State Constitutional Studies. He is also a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School.

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Prof. Murphy is the author of Building the Empire State: Political Economy in Early America. He is currently researching and writing a book about the founding of Paterson, New Jersey as the first federally-planned industrial town in the United States.

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Prof. Murphy has won awards for his scholarly writing and teaching and was most recently the Fulbright Chair in American History at University College Dublin. He leads a research project documenting New Jersey's 1947 state constitutional convention and founded the State Constitutions Lab.

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He has written extensively on history and politics for Talking Points Memo, The New York Times, Politico, Vanity Fair, and other outlets. He was an MSNBC Contributor and has deep experience in television, radio, and broadcast media. He was on the staffs of both Money magazine and George magazine, and was the managing editor of PoliticsNJ.com prior to earning a Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia.

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At Rutgers, Prof. Murphy has been the director of the Honors College and was twice elected as chair of the Newark Faculty Council. He is a member of the AAUP-AFT Chapter at Rutgers.

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He was born in Paterson, went to Clifton High School, and was the first in his family to attend college.

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