Professor Rachel Murphy

Rachel is Senior Tutor and a fellow at St Antony’s College. She obtained her doctorate in Sociology at the University of Cambridge in 1999 funded by an external studentship from Trinity College. She was previously a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Development Studies at Cambridge. She is course director for the MSc and MPhil in Chinese Studies, and former Head of OSGA (2014-2018). She teaches the option course ‘The Sociology of China’, and on the core courses ‘Research Methods for Area Studies’ and ‘The Study of Contemporary China.’

Her expertise sits at the intersections of language-based Chinese studies, development studies, sociology and anthropological demography. She also has interests in the intersections of media communications and sociology. Her long-term research has explored social and cultural change occurring in China because of urbanization, migration, education, demographic transformation and state policies. Over twenty years she has conducted ethnography, interviews, documentary research and surveys in villages, townships and cities, and has spent more than six years in mainland China and several months in Taiwan.

Her most recent monograph, The Children of China’s Great Migration (Cambridge University Press, 2020; paperback edition 2022), supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, is based on longitudinal fieldwork with children, their caregivers and migrant parents who hailed from two landlocked provinces in eastern China. The book provides a rare exploration of migration, im/mobility, urbanization, education, and families’ gender and intergenerational relations through the eyes of rural children whose parents have migrated for work without them. Reviews of this book appear in The China Quarterly, Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Agrarian Change and The Developing Economies. Her first monograph, How Migrant Labor is Changing Rural China (Cambridge University Press, 2002) examined return migrant business creation in China’s rural hinterlands.

Rachel is a former President of the British Association for Chinese Studies (BACS) (http://bacsuk.org.uk) (September 2019 – September 2022) and remains a BACS Council member. She is a member of the ICARDC Network Steering Committee on agriculture and rural development in China. https://www.icardc.org/icardc/partners-organisation/

With Man-Yee Kan and Francesca Tucci, Rachel co-ordinates a Social Science Division network hub on Global Gender in an Era of Care Crises. She is a PI for a new Oxford Taiwan Studies Programme. In December 2021 (with Genia Kostka at Freie Universität, Berlin) Rachel was awarded a small grant from the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership for collaborative activities on ethical online research into private lives in China’.

She sits on the editorial board of Modern China and has previously served on the editorial committees of The China Quarterly (executive), Sustainability, and Sociological Research Online. She is also a former visiting professor at the Department of Education at Hong Kong University and the University of Western Australia Business School.