Ruth Murphy

I joined the department in 2024 as a post-doc working on the Life Worth Living project with Dr. Casey Strine (History) and Dr. Joshua Forstenzer (Philosophy). Life Worth Living, affiliated with the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, is both an academic network and a pedagogical approach that advocates deep thinking about life through engagement with philosophical and religious traditions. 

I am currently in the final stages of my PhD (University of Cambridge), entitled, 'From experience to ethics: Primo Levi's grey zone and Hannah Arendt's banality of evil', and supervised by Professor Robert Gordon. I am particularly interested in how ethical concepts interact with or arise from historical events.

My PhD thesis examines 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 uses to describe the insufficiency of traditional categories of good and evil in the Nazi concentration camps. My work connects, for the first time, these two texts to a series of other foundational writings of the twentieth century, articulating the ethical vision they form together. It offers a completely original interpretation of Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1962) by unearthing the material history of these two seminal works which first appeared as articles, straddled by 1960s advertisements, in The New Yorker.

Finally, my work conceptualises a style of writing I call 'bifocal': a hybrid, non-fiction genre that combines techniques of literature, philosophy, journalism and testimony, integrating personal experience with general reflection.