Welcome! My name is Fallon Murphy.

I am a Phd Candidate and Writing Fellow at Boston University with a dissertation that charts how African American writers, such as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and members of the Cambridge-based Dark Room Collective, sought, preserved, and reimagined institutional archives and its absences as poetic and rhetorical strategies. My dissertation research has been supported by a Leonard and Louise Riggio Fellowship 2025-2026 at Emory University. In 2026-2027, I will be the Donald C. Gallup Fellow of American Literature.

I have a chapters forthcoming in the book Faulknerian Anniversaries (2026), published by the University of Mississippi Press and the Routledge Companion to Textual Scholarship (2028). I have published or will publish in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Reviews in Digital Humanities, The Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America, and Boston Art Review.

At Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, I am curating an exhibition scheduled for the Fall of 2026 titled Voices of Poetry, Song, and Protest on the recent acquisition of Nikki Giovanni’s papers.Rather than just spotlighting Giovanni’s work, the exhibition will put her in conversation with the many Black American, queer, and feminist voices already in the archive. My responsibilities include writing the labels, creating and executing the case displays to optimize both manuscript and audio materials, developing and coordinating programming that engages BU students, and authoring a public talk. Along with my work at the Gotlieb, I have also worked at the Houghton at Harvard University, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Center for Creative of Photography at the University of Arizona, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I enjoy collaborating with many digital humanists on pedagogical projects. My work in the digital humanities is recognized by the MLA’s Public Humanities Incubator program in 2022. Currently, I am a Showcase Editor for the NEH-funded feminist digital humanities project Recovery Hub for American Women Writers . I am also a Digital Content Editor for the open-access digital publication Insurrect!: Radical Thinking in Early American Studies, which centers on Black and Indigenous liberation frameworks in American Studies.

When not teaching or researching, I enjoy taking very long walks, cooking elaborate meals, and spending time with my family.