HNOC Announces Dr. Sharon Ann Murphy as 2023 Williams Prize Winner

Dr. Murphy is a professor of history and department chair at Providence College in Rhode Island. She specializes in the financial history of the United States, with a particular interest in the complex interactions between financial institutions and their clientele. Her latest book, Banking on Slavery (Chicago University Press, 2023), examines the relationship between commercial banks and the development of the southern frontier during the first half of the nineteenth century. She is also the author of Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010; winner of the 2012 Hagley Prize for the best book in business history), and Other People’s Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). She has been an associate editor of Enterprise and Society: The International Journal of Business History since 2011, and just completed her term as president of the Business History Conference.

Learn more about Banking on Slavery on the University of Chicago Press website.