The UBC Department of History is delighted to celebrate the initiative of Dr. Anne Murphy and her groundbreaking collaborative online course which allows UBC undergraduate students to read and learn alongside Pakistani students.
During the 2025/2026 term two semester, HIST 390A: Early Modern Punjabi Language Texts is being conducted online in tandem with an undergraduate class taught by Dr. Ali Usman Qasmi at Lahore University for Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan. Students read the same core text in both scripts that Punjabi is written in: Gurmukhi (commonly used in the Indian Punjab) and Shahmukhi (commonly used in Pakistan). Though it is not a requirement for the class, students are also invited to learn a script that is unfamiliar to them, with help from instructors!
Congratulations to both Dr. Anne Murphy and Dr. Ali Usman Qasmi for making this exciting collaboration a reality for our students!
About the Course
HIST 390A explores the early modern Punjabi-language text, Hīr by Waris Shah (ca. 1767). In this class, students read selections of Waris Shah’s text in Punjabi, and explore secondary literature in English on the historical contexts for the text, as well as more broadly on Sufi (Islamic mystical) narrative traditions in the early modern vernacular languages of north India/Pakistan, and their historical contexts. Waris Shah’s Hīr is available in both Gurmukhi (the script utilized for Punjabi in India) and Shahmukhi (the Perso-Arabic script used for Urdu and Persian, which is utilized to write Punjabi in Pakistan).
- Dr. Anne Murphy
- Dr. Ali Usman Qasmi
About Dr. Anne Murphy
Anne Murphy is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Chair of Punjabi Language, Literature and Sikh Studies. She is a cultural and intellectual historian, and historian of religion, whose work focuses on the Punjab region of India and Pakistan, with interests in language and literary cultures, the history of the Punjabi language in South Asia and beyond, religious community formations in the early modern and modern periods (with special but not exclusive attention to the Sikh tradition), oral history, commemoration, historiography, the history of ideas, and material culture studies. Temporally, her work focuses on the early modern to the modern period. 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), co-edited a book on Sikh intellectual and Punjabi-language author Bhai Vir Singh, and has published articles on the work of Punjabi-language intellectuals Dalip Kaur Tiwana, Kartar Singh Duggal, Ajeet Cour, and Najm Hosain Syed. Her monograph, The Materiality of the Past: History and Representation in Sikh Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2012), explored the idea of “history” in Sikh tradition, tracing the shape of Sikh historiographical practices in textual forms and in relation to material culture 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 teaches classes in the Department of History on the history of South Asia in the early modern and modern periods, the Sikh tradition, and oral history.
About Dr. Ali Usman Qasmi
Ali Usman Qasmi, Associate Professor (History) at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, joined LUMS in January 2012. He received his PhD from the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University in March 2009. Before joining LUMS, he was a Newton Fellow for post doctoral research at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He has published extensively in reputed academic journals such as Modern Asian Studies and Journal of Islamic Studies. He is the author of Questioning the Authority of the Past: The Ahl al-Qur’an Movements in the Punjab (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011). His second monograph, The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan (London: Anthem Press, 2014), was the recipient of Karachi Literature Festival (KLF) Peace Prize in 2015. His third and most recent monograph, Quam, Mulk, Sultanat: Citizenship and National Belonging in Pakistan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023), was the recipient of the American Institute of Pakistan (AIPS) Book Prize in 2024. Dr. Qasmi has co-edited several edited volumes as well, which include Revisioning Iqbal as a Poet and Muslim Political Thinker (Heidelberg: Draupadi, 2010), The Shi‘a in Modern South Asia: Religion, History and Politics (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Muslims Against the Muslim League: Critiques of the Ideas of Pakistan (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
