Dr. Arthur D. Murphy
Department Head
admurphy@uncg.edu
256-1189
ARTHUR D. MURPHY (PhD, Temple University, 1979)
Positions held:
Professor and Head, Department of Anthropology (2004-present) The University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Associate Vice President for Research (2002-2004), Professor of Anthropology (1996-2004), Associate Professor of Anthropology (1990-1994) Georgia State University; Associate Professor of Anthropology (1986-1990) Baylor University; Assistant Professor of Anthropology (1978-1986) The University of Georgia
Interests and/or Activities:
culture and disaster recovery, household economics and demography, immigration, identity
In 1971 I began working in Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico on the factors that caused individuals and households from the rural regions of southern Mexico to migrate to the City. That work which resulted in my AM paper for the University of Chicago sparked my interested in households and the way in which they, as basic units of society, manage their resources to make a go of it in an ever changing economic and political environment. That interested culminated in a large scale study of households in Oaxaca City and 9 other cities of Mexico.
In 1996 I began to research how it is that culture influences the way in which households and individuals react to and recover from natural disasters. To date my colleagues and I have carried out research on Hurricane Paulina in Acapulco as well as floods and mudslides in eastern Mexico. We are currently involved in a comparative study of how social networks impact preparation for and reactions to natural disasters. The study is based on research at the base of Popocatepetl an active volcano located 70 km SE of Mexico City and the district of Penipe, Ecuador. I am currently working on a project in conjunction with the colleagues from REDMH to see how we might use formal structures from network analysis to link with the formal models of stress and social support used by Psychologists to better provide treatment for future disaster victims.
Select Publications:
The Political Economy of Hazards and Disasters. (E C Joes and A D Murphy eds), Altamira, 2009.
“Violence and PTSD in Mexico: Gender and Regional Differences” (with CK Baker, FH Norris, DMV Diaz, JL Perilla and EG Hill) Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 2005.
“Postdisaster stress in the United States and Mexico: A cross-cultural test of the multicriterion conceptual model of posttraumatic stress disorder” (with FH Norris and JL Perilla), Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2001.
Latino Workers in the Contemporary South (with CB Blanchard and JA Hill), The University of Georgia Press, 2001.
