Courses Instructed

• ANTH 13: Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion (GE)
• ANTH 104: The History of Anthropology
• ANTH 131: Europe in the Ethnographic Imagination
• ANTH 146: Ethnographic Analysis
• ANTH 166: Rise of Religious Cults (GE)
• ANTH 167: Religion and Culture
• ANTH 172: Anthropologies of Music
• ANTH 191: Practicum (Culture, Language, and Society)
• ANTH 205: Ethnology (MA seminar)

Biography and Interests

Liam D. Murphy is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at California State University, Sacramento. A native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, he holds a BA Honors degree from Saint Mary’s University (1992), an MA degree from the University of Calgary (1994) and a PhD (2000) degree from Yale University. His work has explored the mutual relations among culture, language, politics, religion, and (more recently) music within and across different societies. In particular, his MA fieldwork, conducted in rural Jamaica in 1994, examined the intersection of religious belief and practice (especially Pentecostalism and revivalism) with local economic and social mobility and dynamics. From 1995, his PhD and post-doctoral fieldwork in Northern Ireland built on this earlier interest by investigating the origins, development, and social effects of popular religious practices (especially charismatic, Pentecostal, evangelical, and ecumenical movements) in the context of an emergent, post-conflict, “Europeanizing” Belfast. He is the author of many articles, book chapters, encyclopedia enteries, and research papers on religion, politics, identity, and anthropological theory, and is also co-author/editor (with Paul A. Erickson) of multiple editions of A History of Anthropological Theory (UTP Higher Education, 1998; 2003; 2008; 2016) and Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory (UTP Higher Education, 2001; 2006; 2010; 2016). His book on Northern Ireland, Believing in Belfast: Charismatic Christianity After the Troubles, was published Carolina Academic Press in 2010. More recently, his edited volume, Religious Diversity Today, Vol. I: Suffering and Misfortune was published by Praeger in 2015. His current ethnographic research and writing focuses on globalization, cultural process, and heavy metal music in Western France.