Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature

Laura T. Murphy is Professor of Human Rights and Contemporary Slavery at the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University (UK). She has been the recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, a British Academy Visiting Fellow, and the John G. Medlin Fellow at the National Humanities Center.

She is the author of The New Slave Narrative: The Battle over Representations of Contemporary Slavery (Columbia University Press, 2019), editor of Survivors of Slavery: Modern-Day Slave Narratives (Columbia University Press, 2014), and author of Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature (Ohio University Press, 2012). Her latest book, Freedomville: The Story of a 21at Century Slave Revolt will be released by Columbia Global Reports in late 2021. Professor Murphy’s research is broadly interested in forced labour globally, with a particular interest in survivor narratives and first-person testimony.

She is currently working on several research projects about the Chinese governments intertwined systems of internment and forced labour that has been inflicted on the people of the Uyghur Region. The work investigates the international supply chains that have ties to those repressive systems. She has previously conducted research on forced labour in India, Nigeria, Ghana, the United States, and Canada.

She has recently been part of a team that created Core Competencies for medical professionals addressing human trafficking in healthcare settings with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Her previous research on the intersection of homeless youth and human trafficking in the US and Canada provided a four-pronged victim-centered community blueprint for how service providers can best assist youth at risk of trafficking, based on interviews with over 600 homeless youth in the U.S. and Canada. She serves as a subject matter expert in the field of human trafficking for the U.S. Office of Victims of Crime and the Administration of Children and Families.

She is also the chair of the research committee of HEAL, an organization dedicated to providing a public health lens to the field of human trafficking.

In addition to her academic presentations, she is a sought-after trainer and public speaker who has educated and motivated community activists, students, law enforcement officers, service providers, and medical professionals to employ a trauma-informed response to serve the needs of survivors of trafficking and contemporary slavery. As a consultant, she provides stakeholders assistance with community-based research, curriculum design, evaluations, and awareness projects in the field of modern slavery, human trafficking, and other social justice issues.

Source: Sheffield Hallam University