Sharon Ann Murphy is a professor of history and department chair at Providence College. Her latest book, Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States was published in 2023 with Chicago University Press. It investigates the critical role played by southern commercial banks in supporting and promoting the system of slavery on the southern frontier, particularly through the use of enslaved lives as loan collateral. She is also the author of Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America, 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. She has been an associate editor of Enterprise and Society: The International Journal of Business History since 2011.
