Affiliated Faculty

<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Dr. Anne Murphy is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Chair of Punjabi Language, Literature and Sikh Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is a cultural and intellectual historian, and historian of religion, whose work spans the Panjab region of India and Pakistan, with interests in Sikh historiography, Punjabi language and literary cultures, commemoration and material culture, religious community formation in the early modern and modern periods, and oral history. She currently holds a British Academy Visiting Fellowship at Royal Holloway University of London (2025).</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Murphy's monograph, <strong><em>The Materiality of the Past: History and Representation in Sikh Tradition</em></strong> (Oxford University Press, 2012), traced Sikh historiographical practices from the eighteenth century to the present through textual forms, material culture, and religious sites. A landmark contribution to the study of Sikh historical consciousness, the book examined how historical memory is constructed and maintained through objects, manuscripts, and commemorative practices. Her article "History in the Sikh Past" (<strong><em>History and Theory</em></strong>, 2007) and "The Guru's Weapons" (<strong><em>Journal of the American Academy of Religion</em></strong>, 2009) represent foundational interventions in the study of Sikh material culture and historiography.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Her second major research program examines the political imaginaries expressed in Punjabi literature across the India-Pakistan border in the decades surrounding Partition. Supported by multiple SSHRC grants (2013–2023, totaling over CAD$285,000 for the major grant alone), this research produced a book-length translation of Lahore-based Punjabi writer Zubair Ahmad's short fiction, <strong><em>Grieving for Pigeons: Twelve Stories of Lahore</em></strong> (Athabasca University Press, 2022, open access), and a completed book manuscript currently under publisher review. Related publications include articles on the work of Dalip Kaur Tiwana, Najm Hosain Syed, and the spectre of sectarian histories in modern Punjabi literature, published in the <strong><em>Journal of Commonwealth Literature</em>, <em>Cracow Indological Studies</em></strong>, and the <strong><em>Punjabi Centuries</em></strong> volume.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Murphy's current research focuses on the early modern history of the Punjabi language, supported by a major SSHRC Insight Grant (2024–2029) in collaboration with Julie Vig (York University) and Jvala Singh (UC Berkeley). She is completing a book-length translation of Waris Shah's eighteenth-century Sufi text <strong><em>Hir</em></strong>, and has published on Punjabi vernacularization, Sufi literary traditions, and religious individualization in early modern Panjab. Her article on Waris Shah's <strong><em>Hir</em></strong> appeared in <strong><em>Asian Ethnology</em> </strong>(2024), and her research on Sufi-Bhakti literary intersections, gender in Punjabi Sufi literature, and urbanity in early modern Panjab has appeared in De Gruyter's "Religion and Urbanity Online" and <strong><em>History of Religions</em></strong> (2025).</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">She has authored or co-edited six volumes: the monograph and translation above, the co-edited <strong><em>Bhai Vir Singh (1872–1957): Religious and Literary Modernities in Colonial and Postcolonial Indian Panjab</em> </strong>(with Anshu Malhotra, Routledge, 2023), <strong><em>Partition and the Practice of Memory</em></strong> (with Churnjeet Mahn, Palgrave, 2018), <strong><em>Time, History, and the Religious Imaginary in South Asia</em></strong> (Routledge, 2011), and the exhibition catalog <strong><em>Duje Pase ton: Arts Across the Border, from the two Panjabs</em></strong> (2023). She has edited or co-edited six special journal issues in <strong><em>Sikh Formations</em></strong>, the <strong><em>Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society</em></strong>, <strong><em>Asian Ethnology</em></strong>, and <strong><em>Nidan</em></strong>, and has published chapters in volumes with Oxford, Cambridge, Routledge, De Gruyter, Brill, and Bloomsbury.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Murphy's community-engaged research includes the "Punjabi in BC" oral history project (2019–2023), documenting Punjabi language advocacy and use in British Columbia, and the "Caste in Canada" project (2020–present) with Suraj Yengde and the Chetna Association of Canada, which continues through a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant (2024–2026) funding a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Dalit Studies. She co-founded the South Asian Canadian Histories Association and the Canadian South Asian Studies Association. Her public humanities work includes the "Creative Interruptions" arts project (AHRC, 2016–2021) culminating in the <strong><em>Duje Pase Ton</em></strong> exhibition, and the digital humanities video-poetry project <strong><em>Jivan Bol</em> </strong>exploring the work of Najm Hosain Syed.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Murphy served as Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives in UBC's Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (2018–2020), Director of the Centre for India and South Asia Research (2019–2020), and UBC Senator (2017–2020). She founded the UBC Interdisciplinary Histories Research Cluster (2019). She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University (2005), her M.A. from the University of Washington (1995), and her B.A. from Brown University (1990). She previously taught at The New School in New York City.</p>