CSASA-ACESA, the Canadian South Asian Studies Association/Association canadienne d’études sud-asiatiques (CSASA-ACESA) is a scholarly association affiliated with the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. CSASA-ACESA, founded in 2019, draws on a long history of scholarship on South Asian Studies in Canada, and is intended to further the academic study of South Asia-Canada and to enhance national awareness of South Asia-related events and resources at Canadian universities and colleges. CSASA-ACESA is proud to host its third Annual Meeting in-person at the Federation’s Annual Congress, Canada’s largest academic gathering (June 15-17, 2024) at McGill University, Montréal.
Send us an email at csasa.acesa@gmail.com to learn more about the association, attending our annual meeting, or becoming involved with the association.
Members of the organizing committee:
Julie Vig, Assistant Professor, York University
Julie Vig is Assistant Professor of Humanities, Religious Studies, and South Asian Cultures at York University. Her research focuses on premodern Sikh and Punjabi cultural production and how it relates to wider cultural worlds and networks of premodern North India (c.1500-1850). Her particular focus is on gurbilās literature and its interactions with broader Brajbhasha literature in the early modern period. She also has secondary research interests in the reception of early modern Sikh texts in the colonial period and women, gender, and sexuality within the Sikh tradition.
julievig@yorku.ca
Andrea Farran, Associate Professor, McGill University
Andrea Farran is Associate Professor in South Asian Religions at McGill University in the Faculty of Arts. She first studied South Asian civilization as an undergraduate at McGill in the Faculty of Religious Studies (B.A.); then in India (Banaras Hindu University, Adv. Diploma in Hindi) and the United States (M.A., University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Ph.D., Columbia University). She has taught in India (Antioch College and S.I.T.), and Singapore (National University of Singapore); her research languages are Hindi-Urdu and Sanskrit. She serves as Vice-President of CSASA-ACESA, the Canadian South Asian Studies Association / Association canadienne d’études sud-asiatiques.
andrea.farran@mcgill.ca
Anne Murphy, Associate Professor, University of British Columbia.
Anne Murphy (Ph.D. Columbia) teaches in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. She is a cultural historian 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, oral history, commemoration, historiography, and material culture studies. Her current research concerns modern Punjabi textual production in the Indian and Pakistani Punjabs and in the broader Punjabi Diaspora, and the early modern history of Punjabi’s emergence as a literary language. .
anne.murphy@ubc.ca
Arafaat Valiani, Associate Professor, University of Oregon
Dr. Arafaat Valiani, PhD is the 2023 Killam Laureate and Visiting Scholar in Community Health Sciences in Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary. He is Associate Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Oregon. Dr. Valiani studied postcolonial and social theory as an undergraduate at Concordia University in Montreal, African history and thought in the United Kingdom (MA School of Oriental and African Studies), and then focused on medical ethnography and modern South Asian history in the United States (MPhil./PhD Columbia University) at the doctoral level. His research and teaching combine transdisciplinary insights from the history of science and postcolonial science studies in order to contribute to the study of genetics and science in modern South Asia, as well as biomedical ethics pertaining to the prospect of introducing precision medicine to address health inequities experienced by racialized communities in North America. His research languages are Kutchi, Urdu, Gujarati and Hindi. He serves as a member of the Executive Committee of CSASA-ACESA, the Canadian South Asian Studies Association / Association canadienne d’études sud-asiatiques.
arafaat.valiani@ucalgary.ca
www.arafaat.com
Swati Chauhan, PhD Candidate, McGill University
Swati Chauhan is a doctoral student at the School of Religious Studies, McGill University. Her
research examines how Sanskrit religious texts conceptualize divinity with attentiveness to the
scholarly interpretations of new theological formulations in early modern Hinduism. As part of
her doctoral research, she is reading the Panchastavi to reconstruct the religious history of
Srividya tantric traditions in early modern Kashmir.