Dr. Olivia Murphy is an Australian scholar of Jane Austen who has written on the intellectual history and culture of the Romantic Period, questions of race and racism in Austen, and queer explorations of Austen’s writings. She studied at the University of Oxford and has held teaching positions at the University of Sydney and Murdoch University.
Dr. Murphy is author of Jane Austen The Reader: The Artist As Critic (2013; Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of Romantic Climates: Literature and Science in the Age of Catastrophe (2019, Palgrave Macmillan) and Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives (2013; Bucknell University Press). She also edited Mary Brunton’s Discipline (2018) for the Chawton House Library Women’s Novels series.
Dr. Murphy has written notably impactful scholarship that has encouraged us to ask questions about how and why we continue to turn to Austen in our time. Her 2020 essay “Queering Jane Austen in the Twenty-First Century” invited us to think with and through Austen about the possibilities of queer life and experience–to ask questions about heteronormativity and the ideology of companionate marriage.
In 2021, Dr. Murphy contributed “Jane Austen and the Whitewashed Past” to The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen (2021). In this essay, Dr. Murphy considers the ways in which Austen has been–and could be–co-oped by alt-right movements, and she unravels some of the myths associated with Austen and whiteness that have served to fuel such deployments by white supremacist groups.
In the videos below, Dr. Murphy reflects on how the alt right has manipulated Jane Austen and her stories, explores how Austen has operated within queer communities, and highlights the potential of Austen’s fiction to reveal differences of perspective and experience.
You can also access Dr. Murphy’s Youtube playlist directly.
Dr. Olivia Murphy Discusses Jane Austen and the Possibilities for the Novel Form
Dr. Olivia Murphy Recalls Her Early Encounters With the Stories and Ideas of Jane Austen
Dr Olivia Murphy Explores Conservative Cultural Assumptions That Inform Austen’s Impact In Australia
Dr. Olivia Murphy Discusses the Perceived Safety and Potentially Threatening Features of Jane Austen
Dr. Olivia Murphy Considers The Importance of Jane Austen For Queer Critical and Creative Inquiries
Dr. Olivia Murphy Reflects on How The Alt Right Has Deployed Jane Austen’s Ideas About Women
Dr. Olivia Murphy Explores The Complex Ideologies of Race and Racism in the Novels of Jane Austen
Dr. Olivia Murphy On The Rhetorics of Exceptionalism That Surrounds Jane Austen
Dr. Olivia Murphy Discusses Issues of Messiness and Fungibility in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility
Dr. Olivia Murphy Reflects On The Value of Austen’s Novels And Style For Appreciating Difference