Dr Kate Murphy - Researcher Profile

Kate Murphy

Address

School of Political & Social Inquiry
Faculty of Arts, Clayton

Biography

Kate Murphy is a graduate of the University of Tasmania (where she was a University medallist) and Monash University. Her PhD, which addressed the meanings attached to the city and the country in early twentieth-century public life in Australia, won a 2007 Mollie Holman Doctoral Medal.

Kate's work explores the powerful influence of rurality in shaping Australian culture and modernity more broadly. She is particularly interested in the role played by gender in Australian culture, and in the history of the family. In 2009 Kate was a research assistant with the ARC-funded History of Adoption project at Monash, and she has co-authored several articles on the history of formal adoption in Australia.

Kate has taught extensively in the fields of Australian history, modern European history (especially gender history and sexuality), and International Studies. She is Examiner for the subject ‘Globalisation' in the Monash University Foundation Year program.

Kate has recently completed (with co-author Professor Graeme Davison) a history of Monash University,entitled University Unlimited: The Monash Story, to be published by Allen and Unwin in April 2012. The history spans the founding of Monash in the full flush of post-war prosperity, the baby boom and the growing demand for higher education; the student experience and 'troubles' of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it became a symbolic centre for student radicalism in Australia; and the reforms and expansion from the late 1980s that have transformed Monash into Australia's largest and most international university.

Kate's current research is on the Australian student movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Qualifications

PHD
Institution: Monash University
Year awarded: 2007
BACHELOR OF ARTS (HONOURS)
Institution: University of Tasmania
Year awarded: 2002

Publications

Books

Davison, G.J., Murphy, K., 2012, University Unlimited: The Monash Story, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, Australia.

Murphy, K., 2010, Fears and Fantasies: Gender, Modernity and the Rural-Urban Divide, Peter Lang, New York, USA.

Book Chapters

Murphy, K., 2005, Rural womanhood and the 'embellishment' of rural life in urban Australia, in Struggle Country: the rural ideal in twentieth century Australia, eds Graeme Davison and Marc Brodie, Monash University ePress, Clayton Vic Australia, pp. 1-15.

Journal Articles

Cuthbert, D., Spark, C., Murphy, K., 2010, "That was then, but this is now": Historical perspectives on intercountry adoption and domestic child adoption in Australian public policy, Journal Of Historical Sociology [P], vol 23, issue 3, September 2010, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, United Kingdom, pp. 427-452.

Murphy, K., 2010, Feminism and political history, Australian Journal Of Politics And History [P], vol 56, issue 1, Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Australia, pp. 21-37.

Murphy, K., 2010, 'The emotional, the weak, the wayward, the innocent, the unsophisticated and the misplaced girl': the Travellers' Aid Society of Victoria and the country girl in the 1920s, JAS, Australia's Public Intellectual Forum [P], vol 34, issue 4, Routledge, Australia, pp. 447-457.

Murphy, K., Pinto, S., Cuthbert, D.M., 2010, 'These infants are future Australians': making the nation through intercountry adoption, Journal of Australian Studies [P], vol 34, issue 2, Routledge, Australia, pp. 141-161.

Murphy, K., Quartly, M., Cuthbert, D.M., 2009, "In the Best Interests of the Child": Mapping the (re) Emergence of Pro-Adoption Politics in Contemporary Australia, Australian Journal Of Politics And History [P], vol 55, issue 2, Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Asia, Australia, pp. 201-218.

Cuthbert, D.M., Murphy, K., Quartly, M., 2009, Adoption and feminism: Towards framing a feminist response to contemporary developments in adoption, Australian Feminist Studies [P], vol 24, issue 62, Routledge, Australia, pp. 395-419.

Quartly, M., Murphy, K., Cuthbert, D.M., 2009, Political representations of adoption in Australia 2005-2007, Adoption & Culture [P], vol 2, Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture, Georgia USA, pp. 141-159.

Murphy, K., 2009, 'The modern idea is to bring the country into the city': Australian urban reformers and the ideal of rurality, 1900-1918, Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture, vol 20, issue 1, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, pp. 119-136.

Murphy, K., 2008, The 'most dependable element of any country's manhood', History Australia, vol 5, issue 3, Monash ePress, Melbourne, pp. 72.1-72.20.

Murphy, K., 2006, The 'unnatural' woman, Australian Feminist Studies, vol 21, issue 51, Routledge, Sydney NSW Australia, pp. 369-378.

Murphy, K., 2005, 'Very decidedly decadent': elite responses to modernity in the Royal Commission on the decline of the birth rate in New South Wales, 1903-04, Australian Historical Studies, vol 36, issue 126, University of Melbourne, Melbourne Vic Australia, pp. 217-233.

Other

Spark, C.H., Cuthbert, D.M., Cregan, K.A., Murphy, K., 2008, Review of selected research literature (1990 to the present), Commonwealth of Australia, Australia, pp. 4-55.

Postgraduate Research Supervisions

Current Supervision

Program of Study:
(MASTER'S BY RESEARCH).
Thesis Title:
Gender and the Developmental State: Low-skilled Female Labour in Singapore 1960 - 1980.
Supervisors:
O''Hanlon, S (Main), Koh, E (Associate), Murphy, K (Associate).
Program of Study:
(DOCTORATE BY RESEARCH).
Thesis Title:
Social History of Adoption.
Supervisors:
Quartly, M (Main), Murphy, K (Associate).