Hannah Murphy is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow. She is the Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at King’s (CEMS), Chair of the Society for Renaissance Studies, (2025-2028), and a former Board Member of the Renaissance Society of America, (2018-2024). She is Principal Investigator of “Medicine and the Making of Race”, a seven-year, £2m project, funded by UKRI, and a former Co-Investigator of Renaissance Skin, a five-year, Wellcome-funded collaborative project led by Prof Evelyn Welch.

Prior to joining King’s in 2017, Hannah was a Junior Research Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford. She was awarded her PhD in Berkeley in 2013, where she was a Fulbright Scholar. She has a BA in History and Political Science from Trinity College Dublin.

Hannah is a historian of science and medicine, with special expertise in the German-speaking lands. Her first book, A New Order of Medicine: The Rise of Physicians in Reformation Nuremberg, was published in 2019 and won the Society for Renaissance Studies Biennial Book Prize. She has published on libraries, medical expertise, artisans, writing practices and material texts, skin, and race-making. Her current research focuses on the practical role of medical expertise in transatlantic slavery.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Early modern medical practitioners and practical structures of slavery
• Race-making and the legacies of the early modern
• Record-keeping and archives
• The history of knowledge
• Science and medicine in early modern colonialism

For more information, please see Hannah's full research profile. 

Expertise and public engagement

Hannah is the facilitator of “London’s Records of Slavery”, a network bringing together librarians, curators, and researchers from twenty-four financial and educational institutions, museums, libraries, and non-profits that have completed or are currently undertaking research into their historical involvement in transatlantic slavery. She served on advisory boards for related projects, including “Underwriting Souls”, the Lloyds’ of London project.

Hannah was the curator of Visible Skin, a collaboration with the artist Peter Brathwaite, which ran September 2021 to February 2022. Funded by a Wellcome D&I Public Engagement Grant, and co-produced by King’s Culture, Visible Skin was a promenade instillation across the newly pedestrianised Strand Campus. It was reviewed and featured in more than fifty media publications. A legacy site can be viewed online.

Hannah has written for exhibition catalogues, the publications of professional associations, and public blogs. She edits the online series, Sources for Slavery, Medicine and Race.

Selected publications

• (2020)) " Skin and Disease in Early Modern Medicine: Jan Jessen's De cute, et cutaneis affectibus (1601), Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 94 (2020), 179-214
• (2019) A New Order of Medicine: The Rise of Physicians in Reformation Nuremberg, University of Pittsburgh Press 2019 - Winner of the Society for Renaissance Studies Biennial Book Prize, 2020
• (2016) Common places and private spaces: libraries, record-keeping and orders of information in sixteenth-century medicine. Past and Present [Special Issue 11: The Social History of the Archive], 230 (Suppl. 11), 253-268