The Materiality of the Past: History and Representation in Sikh Tradition | Humanities & Social Sciences

The Materiality of the Past: History and Representation in Sikh Tradition

Tuesday Seminar
Speaker: 
Anne Murphy (University of British Columbia)
Date and Time: 
Tue, 17/02/2015 - 12:00am
Schedule: 
02:57 PM to 04:27 PM
Venue: 
Humanities Committee Room (MS 610)

Abstract

This talk will provide an overview of the core arguments in my 2012 monograph, and will emphasize the interface between representations of the past in text and object. It will be argued that an approach to representation that embraces the visual and material is crucial to our understanding of textual sources, and that by inviting exploration of the intersections of such sources we gain a fuller reading of the past, and a clearer sense of how our present has emerged from it.

Bio

Anne Murphy is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. She teaches and conducts research on the cultural and religious history of Punjab and South Asia, with a special focus on the Sikh tradition and on Punjabi and other South Asian vernacular literatures. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University, and previously taught at The New School in NYC. Her monograph, The Materiality of the Past: History and Representation in Sikh Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2012), explores the construction of Sikh memory and historical consciousness around material representations and religious sites from the eighteenth century to the present. Current research concerns ethical practice within Sikh tradition, and the formations of modern Punjabi literature, and particularly the articulation of the secular within it, in the Indian and Pakistani Punjabs and in the Punjabi speaking Diaspora.