Rate My Professor Kate Murphy

Dr Kate Murphy is a Senior Lecturer in History and Head of History in the School of Philosophical, Historical and Indigenous Studies within the Faculty of Arts at Monash University. A graduate of the University of Tasmania, where she earned University medallist honours, and Monash University, she completed her PhD at Monash in 2007. Her doctoral thesis examined the meanings attached to the city and country in early twentieth-century Australian public life and was awarded the Mollie Holman Doctoral Medal. Murphy's career at Monash commenced as an Assistant Lecturer in the School of Historical Studies in 2008, progressed to Postdoctoral Fellow from 2009 to 2011, Lecturer in Contemporary History in 2011, Senior Lecturer by 2015, and Head of History as of 2025. She teaches units in History and International Studies.

Murphy's research interests centre on Australian social and cultural history, including the history of the family and postwar social movements, gender roles in Australian culture, formal adoption practices, and student activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She contributes to the Australian Research Council-funded project Fatherhood: an Australian History 1919-2019. Major publications include Fears and Fantasies: Modernity, Gender, and the Rural-Urban Divide (Peter Lang, 2010); University Unlimited: The Monash Story, co-authored with Graeme Davison (Allen & Unwin, 2012); and Fathering: An Australian History, co-authored with Alistair Thomson, John Murphy, Johnny Bell, and Jill Barnard (Melbourne University Press, 2025). Recent peer-reviewed articles feature "The Royal Commission on human relationships and Australian masculinity in the 1970s," co-authored with Johnny Bell (Gender & History, 2024), alongside forthcoming contributions such as "Commerce and culture: Music emporia and modernity in late nineteenth-century Australia" and "Lady amateurs and women musicians: parlour music composers in 1890s Australia," both co-authored with Anna McMichael and J. Healy (Australian Historical Studies and Women's History Review, 2025). Murphy serves on the editorial board of Labour History journal since 2018, has delivered invited public lectures including on Bernie Taft and 1968, and supports UN Sustainable Development Goal 5 on Gender Equality through her work.