Maria Murphy is the Associate Director at Penn's Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies. Her work examines the relationship between music technologies and body politics through multimedia performance art, American experimentalism, and aesthetic activism in the 20th and 21st centuries. She received her PhD in Musicology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 and has taught in music departments and gender, sexuality, and women’s studies programs on topics such as gender & globalization, queer cinema, music & politics, cyborgs & sound technologies, and Western art music. She is currently working on her monograph Bio-Pop: Laurie Anderson, Technobodies, and Aesthetic Activism, which interrogates the performative, sonic, and technological interventions of Laurie Anderson’s multimedia performance art and demonstrates how her aesthetic activism critically re-interprets the modes by which media, technologies, and bodies are understood and classified within governmental institutions, public health organizations, and the popular sensorium in the United States. Her writing has been published in Feminist Review, the Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Gender, Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions, the International Association for Popular Music—United States blog, Sonic Circulations, Title Magazine, and Present Tense Pamphlets.

Maria is also interested in developing creative spaces for hands-on research. She is the co-founder, alongside Roksana Filipowska, of Listening (to) Cyborgs: A Media Archaeology Workshop on Sound Technologies (listeningtocyborgs.com) and she hosts the FQT Center podcast Gender Jawn. As an extension of her research-practice, Maria has performed at Vox Populi, Slought, Maas Garden, the Institute of Contemporary Art Incubation Series, and Fringe Arts Scratch Night. Her work can be found at www.mariaelainemurphy.com.