PhD, Princeton University, 2021

Benjamin Murphy specializes in modern and contemporary art from Latin America, with a focus on the intersections between art, politics, and new media during the last half century. He is currently at work on a book project that explores the emergence of video as an artistic medium in Latin America during the 1970s. Tracking uses of the novel audiovisual technology among a diverse group of artists from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Uruguay, the project investigates how these artists mobilized video to theorize politics at the height of the oppressive military dictatorships that ruled South America during the period. Murphy is also an enthusiastic inter-disciplinarian, committed to exploring how art’s history impacts, and is itself impacted by, other fields of intellectual inquiry both in and outside the academic world. At the University of Oregon, he teaches courses on Latin American art from all historical periods, as well as thematic courses on global modern and contemporary art.

Murphy received his BA from Washington University in St. Louis and his MA from Williams College. He completed his PhD in art history at Princeton University, where he also received graduate certificates in Latin American Studies and in Media and Modernity. His doctoral research was supported by a Donald and Mary Hyde Fellowship and by a Fulbright Fellowship for study and research in Brazil. Murphy has presented his research at various venues throughout the Americas and Europe, and he has published his academic writing in the journal ARTMargins and with the Getty Research Institute. He has also worked professionally as a curator at Mexico City’s Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, where he organized an exhibition on the Mexican video and performance artist Pola Weiss.