Kathleen Murphy

Kathleen Murphy (Col ’01 CM), professor of history at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, published Captivity’s Collections: Science, Natural History, and the British Transatlantic Slave Trade with UNC Press in October 2023. The book explores the entangled histories of the slave trade and science in the eighteenth century. It reveals how naturalists exploited the routes of the British slave trade to obtain thousands of natural historical specimens, including some that survive in modern scientific collections.