Alexander Murphy received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2022. His research centers on modern Japan with a focus on the relationship between sound, language, and the body across literature, media, and performance. In these settings, he is attentive to how aurality enlivens subject formation and social life in transmedial and border-crossing practice, and how the study of voice and sound can be brought to bear on matters of race, gender, and mobility. This concern also animates a range of teaching interests including transpacific cultural production, modernism and the global jazz age, popular and avant-garde performance, and media theory from the 1920s to the present.
Murphy’s current book project explores the aesthetics and politics of the voice in interwar Japan at the intersection of music, poetry and public speech. He is also a musician and translator of Japanese literature and criticism.