Press Releases

Philip Murphy – appointed Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London – University of Reading

Release Date : 26 May 2009

Philip Murphy is currently Professor of British and Commonwealth History at the University of Reading. He joined the History Department at Reading in 1997, having taken his BA and DPhil at the University of Oxford. He has published extensively on decolonization and the development of the modern Commonwealth.

Intelligence history is one of his major interests, and he has produced pioneering work in the area of Commonwealth intelligence liaison. At Reading, Philip established one of the first courses in the UK on the intelligence community and British politics in the twentieth century. He is currently co-editor of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and is writing a book for Oxford University Press on the monarchy and the post-war Commonwealth.

Philip said: "It is a great honour to be appointed director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, which has a distinguished history and is currently celebrating its 60th anniversary. The Institute has a major role to play in promoting and disseminating research in the area of Commonwealth studies, and I am very excited by the opportunity to be able to shape its future."

Extra notes:

He is the author of Party Politics and Decolonization: The Conservative Party and British Colonial Policy in Tropical Africa 1951-1964 (1995), and Alan Lennox-Boyd: A Biography (1999). He is also editor of the Central Africa volume in the series British Documents on the End of Empire: Central Africa (2005), a major project coordinated by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies.

At the University of Reading, he was a member of an inter-disciplinary team which won a major award under the Leverhulme Trust's 'Security and Liberty' programme.