LAURA T. MURPHY, Director and Lead Researcher
Laura T. Murphy is Professor of Human Rights and Contemporary Slavery at the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University (UK). Her research specialty is human trafficking and modern slavery.
Murphy is an internationally recognized trainer and public speaker who has educated and motivated thousands of 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, prevention programs, evaluations, and awareness projects in the field of modern slavery, human trafficking, and other social justice issues. She is the recipient of several awards for her research, including the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar award, a British Academy visiting fellowship, and a National Humanities Center fellowship.
Murphy has consulted for the World Health Organization, the U.S. National Human Trafficking Training and Technical Assistance Center, Covenant House International, the Los Angeles Regional Human Trafficking Task Force, the Asian Pacific Islander Human Trafficking Task Force, the Greater New Orleans Human Trafficking Task Force, the Louisiana Commission for Legal Education, and the Louisiana Governor’s Office. 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. For the Office of Victims of Crime, she has presented community trainings that help stakeholders prevent and respond to trafficking through multi-disciplinary programs. For the Administration of Children and Families, she has created sex and labor trafficking trainings, webinars, e-learning programs, guidance, and toolkits for Runaway and Homeless Youth Providers. Murphy 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.
She is the author of The New Slave Narrative: The Battle over Representations of Contemporary Slavery (Columbia University Press, 2019) and editor of Survivors of Slavery: Modern-Day Slave Narratives (Columbia University Press, 2014). She is currently working on a book about a 2000 slave revolt in India for Columbia Global Reports.
