Professor Rachel Murphy (PI)

Rachel Murphy is a fellow of St Antony’s College. She obtained her doctorate in Sociology at the University of Cambridge in 1999 funded by a scholarship 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 in Contemporary 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'.

Rachel's long-term research has explored social and cultural change occurring in China because of urbanization, migration, education, demographic transition, state policies, and media transformations. 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 China.

Her most recent monograph, The Children of China’s Great Migration (Cambridge University Press, 2020; forthcoming in paperback May 2022), supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, draws on the stories obtained through 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 appear in The China Quarterly and Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

In December 2021 (together with Genia Kostka at Freie Universität, Berlin) Rachel was awarded a small grant from the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership for collaborative activities on ‘Privacy and Ethical Online Research into Private Lives in China’.

Rachel serves as President of the British Association for Chinese Studies (http://bacsuk.org.uk) (September 2019 -) and is on the editorial board of Modern China. She also previously served two terms on the executive editorial committee of the flagship journal, The China Quarterly.

She is happy to supervise dissertation topics on social and cultural change in mainland China and Taiwan.