Lucy Eldersveld Murphy is Professor of History at the Ohio State University, Newark.  Her research focuses on intercultural, interracial, and gender relations on Midwestern American borderlands.  Prof. Murphy teaches courses on Native American, U.S. women’s, immigration, antebellum American, and U.S. Western history.

Her book, Great Lakes Creoles: A French-Indian Community on the Northern Borderlands, Prairie du Chien, 1750 – 1860, is a case study of a fur-trade town in transition (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and her book, A Gathering of Rivers: Indians, Métis, and Mining in the Western Great Lakes, 1737-1832 (University of Nebraska Press, 2000) examined a century of social and economic transformations in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. 

With Rebecca Kugel, she edited Native Women's History in Eastern North American before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing (University of Nebraska Press, 2007).  She is co-editor with Wendy Hamand Venet of the essay collection Midwestern Women: Work, Community, and Leadership at the Crossroads (Indiana University Press, 1997). 

Recently, she co-edited with Mary Elise Antoine Frenchtown Chronicles of Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin by Albert Coryer, which was published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press in 2016. 

Venturing into the digital age, she edited the document collection, “Selma Sully Walker and Native Women's Leadership in Ohio, 1975-2011,” for the online database, “Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires since 1820,” edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin  (Alexandria, Virginia: Alexander Street Press, 2017).

Prof. Murphy helped to create Ohio State's American Indian Studies Program and serves on the AIS oversight committee; in addition she helped to create the Ohio State Newark Earthworks Center and is a member of its Faculty Oversight Committee.  She has received numerous awards, including the Ohio State University Distinguished Diversity Enhancement Award, The Ohio State University College of Humanities Diversity Enhancement Award, Ohio State Newark Robert A. Barnes Award for Exemplary Teaching, and The Committee on Institutional Cooperation American Indian Studies Faculty Fellowship, Newberry Library, Chicago, among others.