Stanford Humanities Center
Dana Murphy (she/her) is an academic and writer whose works endeavor to practice care within liberative contexts, especially across Black healing traditions and diasporic experiences. She is currently appointed as an assistant professor of Black Studies and English at Caltech and serves as a co-book review editor for Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience. Murphy earned her PhD from the University of California, Irvine, and her BA from the University of California, Berkeley.
SHC Project
Foremother Love: Phillis Wheatley and Black Feminist Criticism
Murphy’s first book project, Foremother Love (under contract with Duke University Press), recounts the beauty, promise, and sorrow of the Black feminist critical tradition through the life and work of Phillis Wheatley, one of its early predictors if not practitioners. Indeed, while many readers know Phillis as an enslaved African woman poet, this project highlights her parallel work as a fugitive Black feminist critic: circulating, explaining, critiquing, and responding to her work and its wider contexts in complex and intricate ways.
Selected Critical Works
“Imagining Black Steminist Care: Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti.” In “Black Women’s Contemporary Speculative Fiction,” edited by Susana M. Morris and Michelle M. Wright. Special issue, The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research 54, no. 2 (2024): 58–69.
“‘She Will Remember Everything’: Black Diasporic Feminist Healing Roots in Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban.”Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 12, no. 2 (2023): 5–27.
“Praisesong for Margaret Walker’s Jubilee and the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival.” African American Review 53, no. 4 (2020): 299–313.
“Black Feminist Hoodoo: Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo.” In “‘sing a black girl’s song…sing a song of her life’: Ntozake Shange,” edited by Trimiko Melancon. Special issue, CLA Journal 62, no. 2 (2019): 178–92.
