Anne Murphy teaches in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia and is Chair in Punjabi Language, Literature and Sikh Studies. She is an intellectual and cultural historian, and historian of religion, whose work focuses on the Punjab region of India and Pakistan, with interests in South Asian languages and textual cultures, the history of the Punjabi language, religious community formations in contact in the early modern and modern periods, oral history, historiography, commemoration, and material culture studies. She recently completed her second book manuscript, currently under publisher review, which examines the political imaginaries expressed in modern Punjabi literature across the India/Pakistan border in the two decades before and after Partition/decolonization in 1947. In association with this project, she published a book-length translation of the short stories of Punjabi-language writer Zubair Ahmad, Grieving for Pigeons: Twelve Stories of Lahore, which came out with Athabasca University Press in 2022 (open access), and has published articles on the work of Punjabi-language intellectuals Dalip Kaur Tiwana, Kartar Singh Duggal, Ajeet Cour, and Najm Hosain Syed. As a part of this project, Dr. Murphy also acted as Contributor and Lead for Punjabi literature for DELI, the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Indian Literatures (2025), a project emerging out of four French institutional partners: the academic research teams THALIM (Theory and History of Arts of Literatures in Modernity), MII (Iranian and Indian Worlds) and CERC (Centre for Comparatist Research and Studies), and the laboratory Résurgences. Dr. Murphy’s 2012 monograph, The Materiality of the Past: History and Representation in Sikh Tradition (Oxford) examined historical representation in the Sikh tradition through texts, sites, and material culture, and she edited a book to explore related themes in the early modern and modern periods across languages and regions in South Asia (Time, History and the Religious Imagination in SouthAsia, 2011). She has also published two co-edited volumes entitled Partition and the Practice of Memory (Palgrave, 2018, with co-editor Churnjeet Mahn), and Bhai Vir Singh (1872–1957): Religious and Literary Modernities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Indian Punjab (Routledge Critical Sikh Studies Series, 2023, with co-editor Anshu Malhotra); four guest-edited or co-edited journal special issues, numerous book chapters, and 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, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and other journals. She is currently working on a full translation of Waris Shah’s 18^th century text Hīr, with reference to its earliest manuscripts. She has pursued several projects at the intersection of historical research with the arts, and engages with Oral History as a research practice; her current work along these lines documents the history of the Punjabi language in the province of British Columbia, in Canada and the history and experience of caste in Canada.

Dr Murphy currently holds a British Academy Visiting Fellowship at Royal Holloway University of London in 2025 that has allowed her to take up a new research project, for which she has been awarded a major grant from the Socical Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Previousy, she has been a visiting scholar at Delhi University and The University of the Punjab, Lahore; was Directeur d’Études Associé (Associate Director), L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris in June 2019 and Early Career Scholar and then Wall Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC in 2008-9 and 2016-7; and was Visiting Fellow at the Max Weber Kolleg for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies (Universität Erfurt, Germany) in 2017 and 2022. Committed to international partnerships, she led a collaborative student research program for UBC undergraduates and Punjabi University Patiala students in 2019, working in collaboration with collaborators from that university, and was PI on a multi-national project investigating the history of Partition in South Asia, with a colleague from Silchar Institute of Technology (India), and co-PIs from India and the UK. This project enabled conferences and related events in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Canada.  Committed to interdisciplinary and community-engaged research, Murphy was founder and founding Lead of the UBC Interdisciplinary Histories Research Cluster at UBC (Lead 2019-2021; Associate Lead 2021-22) and has also recently engaged in two major oral history projects: the “Punjabi in BC” research project with collaborators Sukhwant Hundal and Lovneet Aujla, which involved numerous UBC undergraduates and recent graduates in hands-on research, and the “Caste in Canada” project with co-Primary Investigator Dr. Suraj Yengde and the Chetna Association of Canada, an anti-caste community organization.

Dr. Murphy has served as Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives in the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies from 2018-2020, before returning to her faculty position for her 2021 study leave, and served on the UBC Senate, representing the Joint Faculties, from 2017-2020. She served as Director of the Centre for India and South Asia Research in the Institute of Asian Research from July 1, 2019 to August 31, 2020, and before that was Co-Director from 2017-2019. Previously, she was Chair and then co-Chair of the Interdisciplinary program in “Religion, Literature and the Arts,” which became the basis for UBC’s new Program in Religion.

Professor Murphy received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and her Master’s degree from the University of Washington. She previously taught in the Religious Studies and Historical Studies Concentrations at The New School in New York City, and has a professional background in pre-collegiate education and museums. She is from New York City.