Professor Rachel Murphy
Rachel Murphy is Professor of Chinese Development and Society and a Fellow of St Antony’s College. She is course director for the MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies and the MPhil in Modern Chinese Studies. Rachel teaches on ‘the Study of Contemporary China’ and ‘Research Methods’ and convenes an option course in the Sociology of China, which is offered in the MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies and MSc in Sociology.
She studied for her doctorate in the Department of Sociology at Cambridge, supported by a Trinity College external studentship and a Senior Rouse Ball scholarship. She then held a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Development Studies at Cambridge. Later, she taught in East Asian Studies and Social Policy at the University of Bristol before moving to Oxford in 2007. She has also held adjunct and visiting positions at Hong Kong University and the University of Western Australia.
Rachel’s research sits at the intersections of area and development studies, sociology, anthropological demography, and social policy. She examines social changes occurring in China because of industrialization, urbanization, demographic transition, migration, marketization, education and state policies. She is committed to on-the-ground fieldwork to examine social change. Over the past twenty years she has conducted in-depth longitudinal ethnography, interviews, documentary research and surveys in villages, townships, counties and cities, and has spent more than six years in China.
Her latest book, The Children of China’s Great Migration (Cambridge University Press, 2020), supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, draws on longitudinal fieldwork with children, their caregivers and migrant parents from two urbanizing landlocked provinces in eastern China. The book provides a rare exploration of migration, urbanization, education, and families’ gender and intergenerational relations through the eyes of children. Her previous book, How Migrant Labor is Changing Rural China (Cambridge University Press, 2002, Chinese edition published in 2009), offers one of the earliest analyses of return migration and returnee entrepreneurship in China’s rural hinterlands and towns.
She has significant institution-building experience, having previously served as Head of the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA) for nearly 4 years from 2015-2018 and as Director of the Asian Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, 2009-2012.
She has served two terms on the executive committee of the China Quarterly editorial board. She is an editor of the ‘Human Geography and Social Sustainability’ section of Sustainability and is on the editorial boards of Modern China and its sister journal Rural China. Additionally, she co-edits the Routledge book series Comparative Development and Policy in Asia. Rachel is President of the British Association for Chinese Studies (http://bacsuk.org.uk).
She is developing new research projects to explore various social changes associated with China’s ongoing urbanization and welcomes inquiries from potential doctoral students wanting to work on these themes in relation to mainland China or Taiwan.
