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Anne Murphy is an Associate Professor in the Department of History. She was founder (in 2019) and Founding Lead of the Interdisciplinary Histories Research Cluster at UBC from 2019-2021, and continues as Associate Lead with Dr. Hallie Marshall (UBC Department of Theatre and Film) in the 2021-22 academic year. (For more about the Cluster and its work, see: https://histories-cluster.ubc.ca/). She served as Director of the Centre for India and South Asia Research in the Institute of Asian Research/School for Public Policy and Global Affairs from 1 July 2019 to 31 August 2020, and Co-Director from 2017-2019, and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (2018-2020). She was elected to the UBC Senate, representing the Joint Faculties, from 2017-2020. She is a member of the Migration Cluster (now the Centre for Migration Studies).
Dr. Murphy is a cultural historian, with research interests 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. Temporally, her work focuses on the early modern to the modern period, and modern literary production and memorial practices. 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), and has pursued her continuing interests in commemoration and memorial practices in a volume entitled Partition and the Practice of Memory (Palgrave, 2018), co-edited with Churnjeet Mahn (Strathclyde University). Dr. Murphy has published articles in History and Theory, Studies in Canadian Literature, South Asian History and Culture, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and other journals, and has been editor or co-editor of three special journal issues. She has engaged in numerous Public Humanities and Arts projects over the last five years that have furthered these interests (see below under “Current Research Projects”). As indicated on that list, 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 2017-22.
Dr. Murphy has initiated an oral history program in the UBC Punjabi program, in partnership with her colleague Skuhwant Hundal, who retired from UBC in 2019 (see https://punjabi.arts.ubc.ca/research/ and http://blogs.ubc.ca/annemurphy/oral-history/intro/), and teaches classes in the Department of Asian Studies on the vernacular literary and religious traditions of South Asia, South Asian cultural history, and the Punjabi Diaspora. In History, she has taught “From Raj to Republic” (HIST 385) and will teach a two term series of courses on the history of the Sikh tradition. She served until June 30, 2019 as Chair (2016-18) and then co-Chair (2018-19) of the “Religion, Literature and the Arts” Interdisciplinary Program, and continues as a Faculty Advisor in the new Religious Studies program and the “Asian Candian and Asian Migration Studies” program.
See: http://blogs.ubc.ca/annemurphy/, https://annemurphy.academia.edu/, and https://punjabi.arts.ubc.ca/