Rate My Professor Kate Murphy

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.