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Faculty Profile

Michelle Murphy's research interests include the history of technoscience, sex, gender, race, environmental politics and capitalism in the United States through transnational and postcolonial theoretical perspectives.  She is the author of Sick Building Syndrome and the Politics of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience and Women Workers (Duke University Press, 2006), which examines history of low-level exposures and the production of uncertainty in twentieth century American environmental politics, with a focus on labor and office buildings.  The book explores questions of multiplicity, materialization and regimes of imperceptivibility in political contestations over the existence of pervasive chemical exposures. Her forthcoming book is called Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Technoscience, Feminist Health, and Biopolitics in the Contradictions of American Empire. Her newest project – The Economization of Life -- concerns the history of cold-war American imperial projects linking fertility, capitalist development, and environment, with a particular focus on Bangladesh. Selected publications include the edited volume Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments (2004), co-edited with Gregg Mitman and Chris Sellers, as well as articles in such journals as Configurations, Labor History, Feminist Studies and edited collections. She was the editor of RaceSci website dedicated to the critical study of the concept of race in the history science, medicine, and technology (http://www.racesci.org/) from 1996-2007.  She is a council member for 4S and graduate coordinator at the Women and Gender Studies Institute. With Kavita Philip (UC Irvene). She has begun a new collaboration called Red Technoscience.  Her goal of this year is to become a blogger.