People

Research Interests: Postcolonial and World Literature; Literature and the British Empire; British Literature; Bengali Literature (Colonial and Postcolonial); Production of Space and Nature; Nationalism; Globalization; The Novel; Peripheral Aesthetics; Literary and Social Theory; Historical Materialism.

Research Interests: History of South Asia; 19th century history

Publications: Intimation of Revolution: Global Sixties and the Making of Bangladesh, Cambridge University Press, 2023; Does Class Matter? Colonial Capital and Workers’ Resistance in Bengal (1890-1937), South Asia Series sponsored by SOAS-University of London, Oxford University Press, 2004; Paradise Lost?: State Failure in Nepal, Co-authored with Ali Riaz, Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2007.

Research Interests: Indian and Tibetan/Himalayan Buddhist literature and historiography; Tibetan Buddhism, Buddhist poetry, and Indian and Tibetan Buddhist tantric traditions.

Current research revolves around the life of the 10th Shamarpa Chödrup Gyatso (1742-1792), a Tibetan Lama who played a complex role in the fraught relations between Tibet, Nepal and China during the late 18th century.

Publications: Saraha’s Adamantine Songs (2014), a translation and literary analysis of a set of three long esoteric poems composed in the 9th century; translator of Shamar Rinpoche’s book Path to Awakening (2009 and 2011).

From 2013-18, Professor Braitstein was Principal of the Karmapa International Buddhist Institute (New Delhi), where she helped to oversee and implement a curricular transformation that integrated academic and traditional Tibetan methods of teaching and learning. She has been a regular visiting professor at the Rangjung Yeshe Institute (Kathmandu), and in 2018 she was the UBEF Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Sydney. 

Andrea Farran, Academic Director and Student Advisor of the South Asian Studies minor program, is Associate Professor in South Asian Religions and Associate Member in the Department of History and Classical Studies. She first studied South Asian societies 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.

Since 2019, Professor Farran serves as the Vice-President and treasurer of CSASA-ACESA (Canadian South Asian Studies Association-Association canadienne d’études sud-asiatiques) . Her current SSHRC IDG funded research, "Imperial Infrastructure and Himalayan Pilgrimage in India's 'Land of Gods' (1808-2013)," focuses on religious travel and the history of cartography in late colonial India. In 2023, Professor Farran was the recipient of the Principal's Prize for Excellence in Teaching (Associate Professor).

My research and teaching interests focus on archaeological approaches to investigating the politics of everyday life. In particular, I study how entrenched and emergent modalities of power operate at smaller, largely non-institutional scales and contexts to produce historically contingent, sociologically meaningful, multi-scalar landscapes. These interests have led me to research the politics of Neolithic and Iron Age ritual and monumental practices and Iron Age settlement, residential and metallurgical practices and landscapes in southern India. My current research investigates the long term techno-politics of ferrous metallurgy in the south Indian state of Karnataka. I am exploring how assemblages of materials, knowledge and practice contributed to a dynamic social history of metallurgical production and consumption, and in particular how power relations inhabit and extend from technological practices as people attempted to organize and control materials within wider resource assemblages over the course of the South Indian Iron Age, Early Historic and Medieval periods.

I currently co-direct the Maski Archaeological Research Project (MARP), an ongoing field project that explores the dynamic relationship between agro-pastoralism, metallurgy and settlement and the development of regional socio-political organization, differences and inequalities from the Neolithic through Medieval periods in South India.

I am Associate Professor of Persian-Iranian Studies and have worked in the Institute of Islamic Studies since 2009. I teach across all periods of Persian literature with a specialisation in the Persian poetry of pre-colonial South Asia. My first book, Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi: Building an Ark (Routledge, 2016), is a study of poetics and politics in the work of the poet 'Abd al-Qādir Bedil (d.1720) and his circle. I am currently making an English verse translation of Amir Khusrow's poem of 1302, Hasht Bihisht (Eight Paradises) as well as an English translation for Mage Publishers of Daryoush Āshouri’s watershed 2011 study of the poet Hāfiẓ, ‘Irfān va rindi dar shi‘r-i Hāfiẓ (Mysticism and Antinomianism in the Poetry of Hāfiẓ).

I offer a graduate seminar on pre-modern literary theory and meta-literary discourses called Pre-Modern Persian Literary Criticism; another on Islamicate discourses and practices of selfhood called Autobiography in the Islamic World; and another on Persian epistolography called Inshā: Persian Epistolography. I also teach undergraduate courses on Persian literature in English translation and on the literatures (especially Urdu and Persian) and histories of Islam in South Asia.

Chair in Urdu Language and Culture , ISLA

I am an Associate Professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies, and Chair in Urdu Language and Culture (established in 1986 by the Governments of Canada and Pakistan, and McGill University). I maintain the Noon Meem Rashed Archive, a collection of letters, poetry drafts, photographs and life records of "Noon Meem" Rashed (Nazri Muhammad Rashed, 1910-1975), one of the most important 20th century Urdu poets and a pioneer of Urdu modernist literature.My research is focused on the history and literature of Urdu-speaking peoples of South Asia and other areas, including Canada; I also work broadly on South Asian literatures, including literature in Urdu-Hindi, Persian, Punjabi, and Arabic. I teach courses on Sufism, the cultural history of South Asia, marvellous tales in the Islamicate world, Urdu poetry, and the history and cultures of the South Asian and Muslim diaspora, particularly in Canada, and Urdu language courses.

My first book, The Broken Spell: Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in Persian and Urdu, is about the Islamicate romance (qissah/dastan), its form, performance, and epistemological underpinnings. My next book, provisionally entitled The Generous Infidel, will deal with ethics, exemplarity, generosity, and gift theory; and gender performance and heteronormativity in the qissahs, films, plays, and comic-book representations of the pre-Islamic hero Hatim Ta'i.

My research is on Islamic family law in India, which is a subject that has implications for understanding Muslim gender and kin relations, secularism, minority politics, and legal pluralism. My first book, Divorcing Traditions: Islamic Marriage Law and the Making of Indian Secularism, explored secularism, religion, and gender through the ethnographic lens of Muslim marital adjudication in North India. My current projects include a study of a prominent Indian Islamic legal institution in the state of Bihar to which both poor litigants and foreign clerics travel. Traveling for Justice seeks to analyze itineraries to and from this institution both to learn what motivates people to approach it and to ask what their legal decisions demonstrate about contemporary Muslim minority politics.

Aalekhya Malladi received her doctorate degree from the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University in 2022. Her research project focused on Telugu poet and ascetic Vengamamba (1735-1817) investigates the texts and the life histories of this polymath, and conceives of a distinct female perspective on devotion and detachment. This project also examines her hagiographies and the rituals performed at her shrine, which illuminate the way that her at-times transgressive compositions and life histories have been tamed and curtailed by a hagiographical tradition that shapes her life into that of an ideal "female devotee". Aalekhya's research interests include the intersections of bhakti yoga and gender, and Telugu literature. She is fluent in spoken Telugu, Hindi, and French, and has training in reading classical Telugu and Sanskrit.

Twisha Singh holds a Ph.D. from the Department of History and Classical Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Her research areas include South Asian History, Theatre and Performance Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies and her theoretical approaches include feminist and postcolonial literary theories. Currently she is teaching GSFS 302: Gender, Sexuality and Feminisms in South Asia at McGill's Institute for Gender and Feminist Studies. Previously she has taught GSFS 304: Postcolonial Feminist Theories and HIST 341: History of South Asia at McGill and at Concordia University. Her upcoming research publication is entitled, “The ‘deviant ’ performer: complicating the creative labour of early actresses in colonial Calcutta”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Cambridge University Press (2024).

Hamsa Stainton is Associate Professor in the School of Religious Studies at McGill University. He completed graduate work at Columbia University (Ph.D.) and Harvard Divinity School (M.T.S.), and he previously taught at the University of Kansas. He specializes in South Asian religions, particularly Hinduism, and has spent many years studying and traveling in South Asia. He teaches classes on a variety of topics related to the history and diversity of South Asian religions, including courses on the history of yoga, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, bhakti and Tantric traditions, and Hindu goddesses. His recent research and publications focus on the religious and literary history of Kashmir, and specifically the genre of Sanskrit devotional poetry known as the stotra (hymn of praise). His recent monograph, Poetry as Prayer in the Sanskrit Hymns of Kashmir (Oxford University Press, 2019), charts the trajectory of this genre in Kashmir from the eighth century to the present. He has also published a volume on Hindu Tantra, co-edited with Dr. Bettina Bäumer, called Tantrapuṣpāñjali: Tantric Traditions and Philosophy of Kashmir; Studies in Memory of Pandit H.N. Chakravarty. His current research, funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, is called “Navigating the Ocean of Hymns: Popular Sanskrit and the Historiography of Hinduism.”

Narendra Subramanian is Professor of Political Science at McGill University. He studies the politics of nationalism, ethnicity, religion, gender and race in a comparative perspective, focusing primarily on India. Subramanian’s work explores the role of identity politics in political mobilization, electoral competition, public culture, and public policy; the functioning of democracies amidst social and economic inequalities with long histories; and different ways in which policy-makers and citizens attempt to resolve the tensions between official secularism and the significant presence of religion in public life.

Subramanian’s first book, Ethnicity and Populist Mobilization: Political Parties, Citizens and Democracy in South India (Oxford University Press, 1999) examined why the mobilization of intermediate and lower status groups through discourses of language and caste reinforced democracy and tolerance in Tamil Nadu, southern India. His second book, Nation and Family: Personal Law, Cultural Pluralism, and Gendered Citizenship in India (Stanford 2014), traced the course of the personal laws that govern family life among India’s major religious groups, in comparison with experiences in various other countries that inherited distinct personal laws. He is currently engaged in a comparison of the effects of political rights on the socio-economic status of two historically bonded groups, India’s lower castes and African Americans. Titled From Bondage to Citizenship: The Enfranchisement and Advancement of Dalits and African Americans, it focuses on two regions of historically high group inequality—the Mississippi delta in the southern United States and the Kaveri delta in southern India.