Congratulations to UBC History faculty members Dr. Anne Murphy and Dr. Tamara Myers on each winning a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant.
Continue reading to learn about the researchers and their winning projects.
Reconnecting Partitioned Knowledge: Early Modern Punjab in the Archives
“Reconnecting Partitioned Knowledge: Early Modern Punjab in the Archives” brings together a group of scholars – the Primary Investigator, Anne Murphy (UBC), Jvala Singh (University of California, Berkeley), and Julie Vig (York University) – to work collaboratively and independently with under-utilized archival materials in India, Pakistan, and the UK to engage with diverse texts. This project focuses on access to new texts, analysis and interpretation of such texts, and their translation. These activities, in turn, allow the writing of a new history of the early modern Punjab, which will be the culminating co-authored volume that emerges from the project. Grant funds enable scholarly mobility to access archival collections and engage in consultation and research collaboration; the training of students in Canada in early modern textual analysis, interpretation, and dissemination; and the production of both scholarly and more popularly oriented research products. The project will allow for collaborative work among the applicants, as well with students involved and colleagues in the UK, India, and Pakistan.
About the Researcher
Anne Murphy is a cultural and intellectual historian whose work focuses on the Punjab region of India and Pakistan. Their research interests lie 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, oral history, commemoration, historiography, and material culture studies. They are now completing a book that explores the political imaginaries expressed in the Punjabi language in the closing decades of British rule and in the postcolonial states of India and Pakistan. With this Insight Grant, they will re-engage with their work on the early modern history of Punjabi’s emergence in interaction with Persian and Braj Bhasha, which served as a cosmopolitan language across what is now north India and Pakistan in the early modern period, in texts across diverse communities and contexts.
The Runaways Project: Street Youth and the Transformation of Adolescence in Canada, 1960s-1990s
With The Runaways Project: Street Kids and the Transformation of Adolescence in Canada, 1960s-1990s, Myers follows up on her previous publications, Caught: Montreal’s Modern Girls and the Law, 1869-1945 and Youth Squad: Policing Children in the 20th Century, with a volume on street-involved youth. Running away has long been a popular literary trope, cautionary tale, juvenile offense, and cause of moral panics. As such, runaways have at once signified social, political, and generational change and also focused popular and scholarly conversations around critical social issues from children’s rights, sexual and women’s liberation, commercial youth-spoitation, and the abuse of children. As an historian, Myers is interested in how a study of teens’ precocious independence can illuminate the transformation of adolescence at the end of the millennium, specifically how it can revise the history of teenagers, where queer, subversive, Indigenous, and marginalized teens are given centre stage.
About the Researcher
Tamara Gene Myers specializes in the history of children and youth, delinquency and policing, and youth activism. Her published books include Caught: Montreal’s Modern Girls and the Law, 1869-1945, Youth Squad: Policing Children in the 20th Century, and co-edited collections Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History, and The Difference Kids Make: Bringing Children and Youth into Canadian History. Her recent publications include Davies and Myers, “An Accident’s Afterlife: Childhood, Disability, Maternalism, and Rehabilitation,” in Accidents in Canada: A History (2024) and “Policing Women and Girls in Canada, 19th and 20th Centuries,” in, Policing Women: Histories in the Western World, 1800-1950 (2024). She is a longstanding member of the research collective, the Groupe d’histoire de Montréal/Montreal History Group and has served as the President of the Society for the History of Children and Youth.
