Brian Murphy

Brian Murphy is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark and the incoming Fulbright-Mary Ball Washington Chair in History at University College Dublin. In the 2024-25 year, he was in the inaugural class of Steven M. Polan Fellows at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, where he founded the State Constitutions Lab, an interdisciplinary research project and seminar centered on the study of state constitutions. He is currently writing a book about the founding of Paterson, New Jersey, as the first planned manufacturing center in the U.S.

Publications:

• Building the Empire State: Political Economy in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Winner of the 2016 James Broussard Best First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• Research Talk, New-York Historical Society, 22 May 2024.

• “State Constitutions in American Political and Constitutional Development,” Framing the Frontier: The Making of Western State Constitutions Conference, Utah Valley University Center for Constitutional Studies, Provo, Utah, 15 September 2023.

• “Great Falls: Water, Power, and Policy in Early American Capitalism,” The American Developmental State: The Origins of American Capitalism in Comparative Perspective Conference, Institute for Advanced Studies and the American University of Paris, Paris, France, 26 May 2023.

Previous Organizations: 

• The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School

• City University of New York

Accomplishments:

• Steven M. Polan Fellow in Constitutional Law and History, The Brennan Center for Justice

• Co-PI, U.S. Department of State IDEAS (Increase and Diversify Education Abroad for U.S. Students) Grant, “Mediterranean Displacements: Refugees, Exiles, and Migrations from Antiquity to the Present” study abroad capacity building program

Upcoming Projects:

• “Great Falls: Water, Power, and Alexander Hamilton’s Vision for American Industry”

• Records of the 1947 New Jersey State Constitutional Convention (in partnership with Dr. Nicholas Cole, founding director of The Quill Project at Pembroke College, University of Oxford).

My research is concerned with big questions of the role of state constitutions in expanding and protecting rights in the U.S. and animating democratic government, and a historical project looking at the founding of Paterson, New Jersey as the first planned industrial ‘company town’ in the U.S. In each project, environmental questions are front and center. Paterson would not have been founded where it is were it not for the Passaic River, a waterway that was handed over to industry and capital with terrible consequence for people living downstream from pollution and working long hours in water-powered factories. And state constitutions have been important tools to elaborate environmental protections and consider environmental justice questions.

Rutgers University – Newark was awarded a grant by the Mellon Foundation to organize a Sawyer Seminar Series titled Potentialities of Justice: Toward Collective Reparative Futures. The Sawyer Seminar, led by ISGRJ-Newark Campus Director Mayte Green-Mercado, co-organized by Lauren Shallish (Urban Education), and hosted at Rutgers-Newark during the 2024-2025 academic year, will explore themes of social justice centering on four critical areas of inquiry: systemic racism, environmental crisis and climate change, disability, human displacement and post-conflict resolution, to illuminate common histories and methodological frameworks that can inform generative responses to past and present social harms. Each area of focus reflects not only the scholarly interests of our faculty, but also the institutional commitments of Rutgers University- Newark as an anchor institution devoting its resources to serve our community.

https://sawyerseminar.newark.rutgers.edu/