Sharon A Murphy

Sharon Ann Murphy specializes in the financial history of the United States, with a particular interest in the complex interactions between financial institutions and their clientele. Her latest project, “Doing Business in the Public Interest,” is an examination of the public health initiatives of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company during the 1910s-1940s, and how these efforts reflect the complicated role of corporations in public life. Her multiple prize-winning book, Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States (Chicago University Press, 2023) examines the relationship between commercial banks and the development of the southern frontier during the first half of the nineteenth century.  She is also the author of Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) and Other People’s Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). She has been an associate editor of Enterprise and Society: The International Journal of Business History since 2011, and is a past-president of the Business History Conference (2023-24).

Publications: Books

Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States, University of Chicago Press, 2023. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo190178034.html

Winner of the 2023 SHEAR Book Prize (Society of Historians of the Early American Republic)

Winner of the 2023 Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History (Historic New Orleans Collection and Louisiana Historical Association)

Winner of the 2024 Ralph Gomory Prize (Business History Conference)

Winner of the 2024 Bennett H. Wall Award (Southern Historical Association)

Finalist for the 2024 Hagley Prize (Business History Conference)

Other People’s Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/other-peoples-money

Anglo-American Life Insurance, 1800-1914 (co-edited with Timothy Alborn), Pickering & Chatto, 2013 [paperback Routledge, 2016]. https://www.routledge.com/Anglo-American-Life-Insurance-18001914/Alborn-Murphy/p/book/9781848933521

Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010 [paperback 2013].  https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/investing-life

Winner of the 2012 Hagley Prize for the best book in business history (Business History Conference)

 PUBLICATIONS: Articles, Book Chapters, and Cases (selected)

“Doing Business in the Public Interest,” Business History Conference Presidential Address, Enterprise & Society: The International Journal of Business History, v. 25, no. 4, December 2024 (online November 2024): 962-978.

“Enslaved Financing of Southern Industry: The Nesbitt Manufacturing Company of South Carolina, 1836-1850,” Enterprise & Society: The International Journal of Business History, v. 23, no. 3, September 2022 (online February 2021): 746-789.

“Gone to Texas: Deadbeat Debtors and their Human Property,” Journal of the Texas Supreme Court Historical Society, v. 11, no. 2, Winter 2022: 27-43. https://www.texascourthistory.org/Content/Newsletters//TSCHS Winter 2022 2-18 (2).pdf

“The Financialization of Slavery by the First and Second Banks of the United States,” Journal of Southern History, v. 87, no. 3, August 2021: 385-426.

“Collateral Damage: The Impact of Foreclosure on Enslaved People during the Panic,” Forum on the Panic of 1819 in The Journal of the Early Republic, v. 40, no. 4, Winter 2020: 691-696.

“Agents, Regulations, and Scandals: US Life Insurance Companies in Late-Nineteenth-Century Latin America,” in Risk and the Insurance Business in History, Robin Pearson and Jeronía Pons Pons (eds.), Fundación Mapfre, 2020: 61-89.

Winner of the Mansutti Foundation Best Paper Prize. 

https://www.fundacionmapfre.org/documentacion/publico/es/consulta/registro.do?id=171682

“Financing Faith: Latter-day Saints and Banking in the 1830s and 1840s,” in Business and Religion: The Intersection of Faith and Finance, Matthew C. Godfrey and Michael Hubbard MacKay (eds.), Brigham Young University Press, 2019.

“The Panic of 1819 and the Second Bank of the United States,” (co-authored with Robert Bruner), Darden Business School case, July 2018.

“Selecting Risks in an Anonymous World: The Agency System for Life Insurance in Antebellum America” Business History Review, Spring 2008: 1-30.

“Securing Human Property: Slavery, Life Insurance, and Industrialization in the Upper South,” The Journal of the Early Republic, v. 25, Winter 2005: 615-652. 

Fellowships and Other Awards (selected)

2021            Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities

2020            Winner, Harold F. Williamson Prize (Business History Conference) for a “mid-career” scholar who has made significant contributions to the teaching and writing of business history

2019            Fellow, American Antiquarian Society-National Endowment for the Humanities

2019            Winner, Outstanding Faculty Scholar Award, Providence College

2018-19      Fellow, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)

2018-19      Franklin Research Grant, American Philosophical Society

2018            Hugh L. McColl Library Fund Research Fellowship, Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

2017            National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Scholars Stipend

2005            Winner, K. Austin Kerr Prize for the best first paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Business History Conference by a new scholar

2005            The Library Company of Philadelphia Post-Doctoral Fellow, Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES)