Professor; Department Chair
About
Andrew Murphy joined the Political Science Department at Michigan after appointments at Virginia Commonwealth University, Rutgers University, Valparaiso University, and the University of Chicago. He became department chair in July 2024.
Murphy's research takes up the intersections between politics and religion, in both historical and contemporary contexts. He is particularly interested in the emergence of religious liberty and liberty of conscience in early modern England and America, and the ongoing ramifications of these debates as they continue to unsettle American politics. He is the author, most recently, of Toleration: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2025), which canvasses the history, development, and contemporary global status of toleration as both a concept and a contested legal practice. More specifically, Murphy's work has focused in recent years on the life, career and political thought of William Penn, a figure who brought political theory and practice together in the early modern British Atlantic. He is the author of William Penn: A Life (Oxford, 2019) and Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration: The Political Thought of William Penn (Oxford, 2016); and co-editor (with John Smolenski) of The Worlds of William Penn (Rutgers, 2019). An edition of Penn's political writings, for the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series, appeared in 2021.
His work on Penn and toleration continues the exploration of these topics begun in his first book, Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America (Penn State, 2001). More contemporary interests are reflected in his co-authored book (with David S. Gutterman, of Willamette University) Political Religion and Religious Politics: Navigating Identities in the United States (Routledge, 2015), and his Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11 (Oxford, 2008).
Murphy's current research continues to bring together the political and the religious, exploringthe concept of political martyrdom and the ways in which studying politically-charged deaths can help us make sense of the complex interplay of death, religion, politics, collective memory, and symbolic power.
