Mary C. Murphy joined Boston College in Fall 2024. Her main research and teaching interests include: Ireland/Northern Ireland and the EU, peace and conflict in Northern Ireland, and the politics of Brexit on the island of Ireland. Her current research focuses on post-Brexit Northern Ireland and relations with the EU and US. In addition to being a member of the Political Science Faculty, she is the Director of the Irish Institute at Boston College.
Her latest book, co-authored with Jonathan Evershed, A Troubled Constitutional Future: Northern Ireland after Brexit, Agenda/Columbia University Press 2022, won the UACES Best Book Prize in 2023. The book examines the factors, actors and dynamics that are most likely tobe influential, and potentially transformative, in determining Northern Ireland's constitutional future after Brexit. It offers an assessment of how Brexit and its fallout may lead to constitutional upheaval, and includes a cautionary warning about the need to prepare for it.
She is also the author of Europe and Northern Ireland’s Future: Negotiating Brexit’s Unique Case, Agenda/Columbia University Press 2018 which was one of the first book-length studies of Northern Ireland and Brexit. Her previous book, Northern Ireland and the European Union: The Dynamics of a Changing Relationship, was published by Manchester University Press in 2014. She has guest edited special issues of Irish Political Studies, Administration and Irish Studies in International Affairs (forthcoming) and her work has also been published in leading academic journals including The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, International Political Science Review and Territory, Politics, Governance.
Before joining the faculty at Boston College, she was Head of the Department of Government and Politics at University College Cork, Ireland. She is the former President of the Irish Association for Contemporary European Studies, has twice been awarded an Erasmus+ Jean Monnet Chair award and holds a fellowship with the Centre on Constitutional Change at Edinburgh University. She was also previously a Fulbright-Schuman scholar and has won the Political Studies Association of Ireland (PSAI) Teaching and Learning Prize.
