Anne Murphy is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies and co-Director of the Centre for India and South Asia Research at the University of British Columbia. She teaches and conducts research on the vernacular literary and religious traditions of the Punjab region (India & Pakistan).

She is also Acting Associate Dean for Faculty and Program Development, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, for 2018-9. Current research pursues two interrelated lines of inquiry: modern Punjabi cultural production in the Indian and Pakistani Punjabs and in the Diaspora, and the early modern history of Punjabi's emergence as a literary language. Her monograph, The Materiality of the Past: History and Representation in Sikh Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2012), explored the construction of Sikh historical consciousness within texts, objects and religious sites from the eighteenth century to the present, and a thematically related volume entitled Time, History, and the Religious Imaginary in South Asia (Routledge, 2011). She 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). 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. She taught previously at the New School for Social Research, and is originally from New York City.

She will take part of the Visting Professors Program designed by EHESS, on proposal ofinvited by Caterina Guenzi (CEIAS) from June 3^th  till June 30^th .

Conférences

Punjabi and the politics of language in India and Pakistan

Dans le cadre du séminaire Actualités de la recherche en Asie du Sud

• Juin 2019

This talk will explore the complex relationship between the Punjabi language and the state in Pakistan and India, and the troubled nature of both its incorporation into state interests and its marginalization. It does so through a focus on key Punjabi language writers and their positioning in relation to both the literary and state power.

A language among languages: Punjabi's emergence at intersection with Persian, Braj, and Hindustani

Dans le cadre de l'atelier thématique Histoires de soi, histoires des autres : questions de traduction et d’historiographie

• Juin 2019

This lecture will present ongoing research on the emergence of Punjabi "literarization"—that is, in the terms laid out by Sheldon Pollock, the use of Punjabi in literary terms—in relation to the emergence of other vernacular literatures in the early modern period, particularly Urdu and Braj.

A language and a cause: Progressive politics and the literary in the fight for Punjabiin India and Pakistan

Dans le cadre du séminaire mensuel du projet DELI : Littératures d’Asie du Sud

• Juin 2019

This talk explores the progressive roots of modern Punjabi literature (in relation to the broader history of vernacular cultural production) through the story of Gurbax Singh "Preet Lari" and Preet Nagar, the intentional community that he founded in the 1930s in colonial Punjab.

Examination of these progressive roots will then be extended to think through the work of Ajeet Cour and Dalip Kaur Tiwana, prominent women writers in Punjab, and the articulation of women's writing within the persistent patriarchy undergirding the progressive ethos of Punjabi literature.

The work of memory: Engaging the severed past along the Indo-Pakistan border

Dans le cadre du seminaire Partitions territoriales : imaginaires et représentations

• Juin 2019

This talk, delivered jointly with visual artist Raghavendra Rao K.V., addresses "memory work" along the Indo-Pakistan border that attempts to call to mind a once-shared culture that now is divided by an international boundary. The results of a series of artists' residencies and an exhibition in February 2019 will be presented, and placed in the context of a larger effort to integrate the arts and research.