Anne Murphy

Lecturer in History at the University of Hertfordshire and Associate Director of the Centre for Financial History at Newnham College at University Of Cambridge

Anne Murphy is a Lecturer in History at the University of Hertfordshire and Associate Director of the Centre for Financial History at Newnham College, Cambridge. She joined academia after spending twelve years in the City trading various currencies and instruments in the international foreign exchange and money markets. Her research interests derive from that background in finance, and concern the nature of Europe's financial markets, the behaviour of investors, and the function and relevance of financial information from the early modern period to the present day. She is also interested in the ways that the developing society and culture of the early modern period impacted upon the economic choices made by individuals, and thus has a broad interest in the cultural, social and intellectual history of the early modern period. Her most recent research project focused on the Bank of England during the later eighteenth century. It drew on an audit of the Bank’s various departments conducted in 1783 and provides a unique insight into the workings of an institution that, by the late eighteenth century, was viewed as part of the British constitution. The principal outcome of the project was a monograph entitled The Grand Palladium of Public Credit: the Bank of England during the later eighteenth century.