Edward Murphy
Associate Professor
Edward Murphy is an expert on mass urbanization, inequality, state formation, and squatting in Chile; Latinx immigration and deportations
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Edward Murphy's research and teaching explores themes of mass urbanization, inequality, domesticity, state formation, and political economy, with a particular focus on the property regimes of low-income groups. While rooted in the concerns and approaches of Latin American historiography, he also draws on the perspectives of other disciplines, especially anthropology. He has primarily focused on Chilean history since the 1950s, but has also produced scholarship on Guatemala. In 2004, he published ... a book of collaborative oral histories in Santiago, Chile, Historias poblacionales: hacia una memoria incluyente. He has also been the lead editor of two volumes, the first on work at the intersections of anthropology and history and the second on modern urban housing regimes in global perspective from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Recently, he has also worked in Michigan with Latinx immigrants who are facing deportations.
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University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: Ph.D., Anthropology and History | 2006
Georgetown University: M.A., Latin American Studies | 1998
Georgetown University: B.A., English and History | 1994
Selected Press
Can Half a Good House Become a Home?
The New Republic | 2016-06-14
That the Chilean government has invested more than many other governments in social housing is also contingent on the country’s unique history. What is often ignored is the history of massive, organized land seizures in Chile that forced the government to stop treating housing as a commodity. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, up to 14 percent of Santiago’s population took part in regular land seizures, and some 50,000 people took part in such actions even under Pinochet’s rule. Edward Murphy, a professor and author of For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile, 1960-2010, asserted that a considerable organized left forced the state to recognize housing as a basic right, which is still a belief shared by the majority of Chilean citizens and those in government.
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Edward Murphy