Welcome!

Lacy Murphy holds a BA in French from Truman State University and an MA and PhD in Art History from Washington University in St. Louis. She defended her dissertation, “Colliding Worlds: Visual Culture in France and Colonial Algeria (1918–1962),” in Fall 2023. Her dissertation offered the first comprehensive study of the apogee, deterioration, and conclusion of French colonialism in Algeria alongside the rise, fermentation, and apex of Algerian nationalism, with particular attention to ephemeral and reproductive media. Her study of World War II propaganda in Algeria, published in the Journal of North African Studies, was awarded the Mark Tessler Graduate Student Prize by the American Institute of Maghrib Studies.

Currently, Lacy is the inaugural Cynthia Woods Mitchell Scholar-in-Residence in Art History at the University of Houston. Her recent research examines how states deploy visual and reproductive media to advance ideologies, shape national identity, and mediate conflict, with a regional focus on the Arab world and Iran. During her residency, Lacy will be developing a new project on the Saqqakhaneh group, a circle of loosely affiliated modern Iranian artists active during the final years of the Pahlavi dynasty.

Broadly speaking, Lacy’s teaching centers on modern and contemporary art in the Arab and Islamic worlds, with particular attention to how artists navigate questions of identity, conflict, and resistance. She also teaches courses on modern art and architecture in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, as well as Islamic art and its intersections with European modernism. She has held fellowships at WashU’s Center for the Humanities and the Saint Louis Art Museum, and completed a residency at the National Humanities Center.