Laura Murphy

Laura Murphy is a Senior Associate at CSIS and a Fellow at the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights in the Kennedy School at Harvard University. Until 2025, she was Policy Advisor to the Under Secretary in the Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans, U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Until 2023, she was Professor of Human Rights and Contemporary Slavery at the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University (UK). She has been the recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, a British Academy Visiting Fellow, and the John G. Medlin Fellow at the National Humanities Center.

She is the author of Freedomville: The Story of a 21st Century Slave Revolt (Columbia Global Reports, 2021), The New Slave Narrative: The Battle over Representations of Contemporary Slavery (Columbia University Press, 2019), editor of Survivors of Slavery: Modern-Day Slave Narratives (Columbia University Press, 2014), and author of Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature (Ohio University Press, 2012). She is also editor of the Cambridge Companion to Slavery and Global Literature (Cambridge UP, 2022).