Sharon Ann Murphy is a professor of history at Providence College in Providence, RI. She is the author of Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America (2010, Johns Hopkins University Press), 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 (2017, Johns Hopkins University Press). Her newest book (forthcoming 2023 with the University of Chicago Press) is currently titled Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum U.S. It investigates the critical role played by southern banks in supporting and promoting the system of slavery on the frontier, particularly through the use of enslaved lives as loan collateral.
