Dr Ruth Murphy

Ruth Murphy is a post-doctoral researcher working on the history and memory of Allied prisoners of war in Italy. Her research interests range from Italian literature and history of the Second World War, to ethics and aesthetics in the 20th century. Around these themes, she has published work on the relationship between literature and moral philosophy, on Elsa Morante's 1979 novel La Storia, and on the resonances between the writing of Primo Levi and James Baldwin. 

Current research project

After Italy surrendered to the Allies on 8 September 1943, nearly 50,000 Allied POWs escaped from Italian prison camps. Many of these fugitives were helped and hidden by local Italians. Building on an archive of first-hand accounts from the period collected by the Monte San Martino Trust and now held at the Cambridge University Library, Ruth’s research project is entitled ‘Connecting tunnels. An integrated narrative of POW stories’. The central idea is to combine the archive’s rich collection of POW stories and those of their helpers; ‘tunnels’ which often quite literally intersected!

The book she is writing brings together many different voices into a coherent narrative, and tells the story exclusively through the words of its protagonists. Such an approach has both literary and historical value. It shows how the same historical event is lived quite differently among those involved, it provides an immersive experience of the past (by eliminating the author’s ‘voiceover’), and it also has a vibrant comic value.

Alongside this work, Ruth has a strong interest in the relationship between ethics, literature, and history, and particularly how ethical concepts interact with or arise from historical events. Her PhD at the University of Cambridge was entitled ‘Ethical Vision in the Twentieth Century: Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin’, and supervised by Professor Robert Gordon. It focussed on two ethical concepts which arose as responses to the Holocaust and have since made their way into our shared moral vocabulary: Arendt's 'banality of evil', inspired by her portrait of Adolf Eichmann (Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963), and Levi's 'grey zone' (The Drowned and the Saved, 1986), the term he used to describe the insufficiency of traditional categories of good and evil in the Nazi concentration camps. In her thesis, these two texts were connected to a series of other influential ethical writings (work by James Baldwin, alongside the philosophy of Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, María Lugones, and Miranda Fricker), articulating the vision they form together. 

Ruth is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin (European Studies) and, following her PhD at Cambridge, held a post-doctoral position on the Life Worth Living project at the University of Sheffield.