Colleen Murphy has served as Vice Provost for Global Engagement at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign since August 2026. As Vice Provost for Global Engagement, she is the university’s senior international officer, overseeing Illinois International and campuswide initiatives that promote global learning, discovery, and engagement.

Professor Murphy is a scholar and teacher in the areas of moral, political, and legal theory. Her research focuses specifically on political reconciliation and transitional justice in response to entrenched injustice, and on the legal and ethical dimensions of risks. She is the author of The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which received the 2017 North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award and the Wayne R. LaFave Award for Excellence in Faculty Scholarship from the Illinois College of Law. She is also the author of A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Professor Murphy is the co-editor of several interdisciplinary edited volumes, including Technology and Equality (Rowman and Littlefield), Climate Change and its Impacts: Risks and Inequalities (Springer 2018), Risk Analysis of Natural Hazards (Springer 2015), and Engineering Ethics for a Globalized World (Springer 2015). She has authored or co-authored more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles, law review articles, and anthologized book chapters in prominent venues including the American Journal of Political Science, Law and Philosophy, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Risk Analysis, and the University of Illinois Law Review.

At Illinois, Professor Murphy has held several academic and administrative leadership roles at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, most recently completing her service as associate dean for academic affairs in the College of Law. Professor Murphy has served as the inaugural chair of the campus committee for the Illinois Scholars at Risk Program, a Provost Fellow, the Director of the Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Program (now Center for the Study of Global Gender Equity) in the Illinois Global Institute (IGI), the Acting Executive Director of IGI, a Humanities Research Institute – Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow in Legal Humanities, and an Associate of the Center for Advanced Study. She has also held a Laurence Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellowship at the Princeton University Center for Human Values, a Public Voices Fellowship for the University of Illinois System, a Mellon Academic Leadership Fellowship for the Big Ten Academic Alliance, and a Visiting Professorship at the 4.TU Centre for Ethics in the Netherlands.

Professor Murphy’s home as an Illinois faculty member is the College of Law where she is the Roger & Stephany Joslin Professor of Law. She also holds courtesy appointments as a Professor of Philosophy and of Political Science in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

Professor Murphy is the co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Transitional Justice and serves on the editorial boards of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, FQP/PPI Filosofia e questioni Pubbliche/Philosophy and Public Issues, Law and Philosophy, Philosophy and Public Affairs, and Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure. She has served on the Executive Board for the National Institute for Engineering Ethics and has received more than $1M of funding to support her research from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Qatar National Research Fund, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Professor Murphy has delivered more than 160 invited keynotes and lectures at universities throughout the United States and in 12 countries worldwide. She has also written or recorded more than a dozen popular op-eds and podcasts about her research in the Boston Review, Chicago Tribune, The Conversation, and Ms. Magazine, among others.

Professor Murphy holds a M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame. Prior to joining the Illinois faculty in 2012, Professor Murphy was on the faculty at Texas A&M University.

Born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, Professor Murphy spent 15 years living outside the Midwest and the United States before returning to her home state of Illinois. She and her husband, Paolo Gardoni, are parents to sons Peter and Patrick.