Alexander B. Murphy - Biographical Sketch#

ALEXANDER B. MURPHY is Professor of Geography at the University of Oregon, where he also holds the James F. and Shirley K. Rippey Chair in Liberal Arts and Sciences. He specializes in political, cultural, and environmental geography, with regional emphases in Europe and the Middle East. Murphy is Senior Vice President of the American Geographical Society and a Past President of the Association of American Geographers. He co-edited Progress in Human Geography for eleven years, and currently serves as an editor of Eurasian Geography and Economics. In the late 1990s Murphy led the effort to add geography to the College Board’s Advanced Placement Program. He recently chaired the National Academy of Sciences — National Research Council Committee charged with identifying “Strategic Directions for the Geographical Sciences.”

Alexander Murphy is the author of more than ninety articles and several books, including The Regional Dynamics of Language Differentiation in Belgium (University of Chicago, 1988), Cultural Encounters with the Environment (edited with Douglas Johnson; Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), The European Culture Area, 5th ed. (with Terry Jordan-Bychkov and Bella Bychkova Jordan; Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), and Human Geography: People, Place, and Culture 10th ed. (with Erin Fouberg and Harm de Blij; Wiley, 2009). He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Fulbright-Hays Research Grant in 1985, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1991, a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in the mid-1990s, a National Council for Geographic Education Distinguished Teaching Award in 2001, Gilbert Grosvenor Honors for Geographic Education from the Association of American Geographers in 2008, a Queen Mary (University of London) Distinguished Visiting Fellowship in 2009, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency Fellowship in 2011. Professor Murphy was elected to membership in the Academia Europaea in 2011. He holds a bachelors degree in archaeology from Yale University, a law degree from the Columbia University School of Law, and a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Chicago.

Curriculum vitae