Craig N. Murphy

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Craig N. Murphy is the M. Margaret Ball Professor of International Relations at Wellesley College. His research considers the links between the dynamics of industrial capitalization and the internationalization of governance, with a special focus on institutions designed to mitigate the inequalities created by globalization.

At Radcliffe, he will investigate processes of “voluntary consensus standard setting,” originally invented by nineteenth-century engineers to determine the dimensions of things like screw threads. In recent decades, the idea has increasingly been applied in fields far from its mechanical and material origins. There are now voluntary consensus standards for business, environmental preservation, and human rights, extensions of the original engineering practice anticipated almost a century ago by social scientists. Murphy is collaborating with his wife, JoAnne Yates, the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on these ideas.

Murphy's most recent book, The United Nations Development Programme: A Better Way? (Cambridge University Press, 2006), received the 2007 Chadwick F. Alger Prize for the best study in the field of international organization. The international public policy journal Murphy founded, Global Governance, received the Association of American Publishers award for the best new journal in 1996. Murphy is a past president of the International Studies Association and past chair of the Academic Council on the UN System. He did his undergraduate work at Grinnell College, received his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has held visiting appointments at Brown, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Wesleyan universities.