Conference 2018

Anne Murphy

Associate Professor in Asian Studies, University of British Columbia

Anne Murphy is associate professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia and, from 2017-2020, co-Director of the Centre for India and South Asia Research in the Institute of Asian Research. Dr. Murphy’s research interests focus on early modern and modern cultural representation in Punjab and within the Punjabi Diaspora, as well as more broadly in South Asia, with particular attention to the historical formation of religious communities and special but not exclusive attention to the Sikh tradition. Her monograph, The Materiality of the Past: History and Representation in Sikh Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2012), explored the construction of Sikh memory and historical consciousness in textual forms and in relation to material representations and religious sites from the eighteenth century to the present. She edited a thematically related volume entitled Time, History and the Religious Imaginary in South Asia (Routledge, 2011). She has published articles in History and Theory, Studies in Canadian Literature, South Asian History and Culture, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and other journals.

Dr. Murphy is currently pursuing research on the history of the Punjabi language and the early modern and modern emergence of Punjabi literature, for which she has received major funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council from 2017-2022. She also has established interests in Punjabi Canadian cultural production. She received the Dean of Arts Research Award for 2017, which provides for a term free of teaching. She was a Wall Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia in 2016-2017 and, from May to July 2017, was a visiting fellow at the Max-Weber-Kolleg Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the Universität Erfurt, Germany.