Keith M. Murphy

Biography

Keith M. Murphy, Ph.D., is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. His research examines the cultural dimensions of design, typography, and the material forms through which social and political life is organized. Murphy has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Sweden, studying how design practices interact with national identity and democratic values, and more recently has focused on the social worlds of typographers and the cultural politics of graphic language.

Murphy is the author of Letterwork: On Caring for Type in the Computer Age (University of Chicago Press), Swedish Design: An Ethnography (Cornell University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Designs and Anthropologies: Frictions and Affinities (School of Advanced Research Press, 2021) and Toward an Anthropology of the Will (Stanford University Press, 2010). His work has appeared in journals including American Ethnologist, Annual Review of Anthropology, Design Studies, Journal of Pragmatics, and Semiotica. His article "A Cultural Geometry: Designing Political Things in Sweden" was selected for inclusion in American Ethnologist's virtual issue on visibility and politics.

Murphy has received research support from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship program. He was named Professor of the Year at the University of California, Irvine in 2016 and has received multiple teaching awards from the School of Social Sciences. Murphy received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Education

• Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, 2008
• M.A. in Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, 2001
• A.B. in Anthropology, University of Chicago, 1999

Distinctions

• Pi Gamma Mu Social Sciences Honors Society Induction, 2017
• School of Social Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award, University of California, Irvine, 2024
• Professor of the Year, University of California, Irvine, 2016
• Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award, School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine, 2016