Alexandra K. Murphy

Alexandra K. Murphy is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD in 2012 from the Department of Sociology at Princeton University where she was also a fellow in the Joint Degree Program in Sociology and Social Policy. 

Murphy is currently completing a book on her ethnographic study of suburban poverty. Drawing on three and a half years living in one Pittsburgh suburb experiencing rising poverty, the book examines the everyday lives of African American poor families and the organizational and political life of the suburban context in which they live.

Murphy's other research includes studies of antipoverty organizations in poor suburbs and urban versus suburban differences in organizational capacity. "The Urban Ethnography Reader," which she has been co-editing with Mitchell Duneier and Philip Kasinitz, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in the Fall of 2013.