Dr Murphy is a Senior Lecturer in Critical and Cultural Studies, teaching visual and material culture at IADT Dun Laoghaire. Her work on the formation of the Natural History Museum Dublin as an interlocking set of historical, scientific, social, and visual frameworks was published as ‘The First National Museum’: Dublin’s Natural History Museum in the mid-nineteenth century in October 2021. The book was shortlisted for the 2022 Royal Historical Society Whitfield Prize.