Dr. Rachel Murphy

Biography

Rachel Murphy is Professor of Chinese Development and Society and Fellow of St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford. She obtained her doctorate in Sociology from the University of Cambridge in 1999. Her research sits at the intersections of area development studies, sociology, and anthropological demography. Her work examines social changes occurring in China due to industrialization, urbanization, demographic transition, migration, marketization, and education state policies. Over the past twenty years, she has conducted ethnographic research, interviews, and surveys in villages, townships, counties, and cities, and has spent more than six years in China. Her latest book, "Children China’s Great Migration" (Cambridge University Press, 2020), supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, draws on longitudinal fieldwork with children and caregivers of migrant parents in urbanizing eastern China. Murphy provides a rare exploration of migration, urbanization, education, and families’ gender and intergenerational relations through the eyes of rural children and their parents who have migrated for work. Her publications appear in leading journals such as Population and Development Review, Population, Space and Place, Development and Change, Journal of Peasant Studies, and the China Quarterly.

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