AJ Murphy

Education

Ph.D. Historical Linguistics and Syntactic Theory, University of South Carolina

M.A. Syntactic Theory, University of South Carolina

B.A. English and Classics, Marshall University

Biography

Dr. Anyssa (AJ) Murphy began teaching at Bradley University in Fall 2025. At Bradley University she teaches professional writing, language theory, and grammar courses. Previously, Dr. Murphy taught English and Linguistics classes at the University of South Carolina. She earned her Master’s degree in English & Classics at Marshall University in her hometown of Huntington, WV. She earned her M.A./Ph.D. in historical linguistics and syntax from the University of South Carolina. Dr. Murphy is interested in the intersection of literature and linguistics, as well as the development of quantitative methods for measuring language change and variation.

Teaching

Dr. Murphy teaches professional writing, language theory, and grammar courses.

Scholarship

Dr. Murphy’s research takes an interdisciplinary approach to linguistics. In her personal research, Dr. Murphy is interested in the ways in which morphological and syntactic variation can be wielded by authors to communicate semantic and pragmatic information, particularly in ancient literature. In service of this, Dr. Murphy’s research has focused on Classical Greek (for which she has been published in ‘The Journal of Greek Linguistics’) and Old English (and Germanic languages broadly). Currently, Dr. Murphy is working on research that uses the York-Toronto-Helsinki Corpus of Old English to explore morphological and syntactic variations in the Old English passive construction, exploring what these variations indicate about authorial intention and expressions of agency.

Dr. Murphy is also involved with the Language Conflict Project (LCP), a collaboration of linguistics, language, computer science, and political science scholars dedicated to understanding the relationship between ethno-political conflict, language policy, and language similarity/difference. For the LCP, Dr. Murphy has worked with Drs. Stanley Dubinsky and Michael Gavin to develop the Language Distance Metric, a computational system for empirically measuring the distance between languages, quantifying lexical, grammatical, phonological, and orthographic difference.