नेपालीमा अन्तरवार्ता पढ्नुहोस – नेपाली पत्रकारहरू यहि हेर्नुहोला

Anna Stirr is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. From 2021-2024, she was the Director of the Center for South Asian Studies. Her latest publication is Music and Dances from Central Nepal: The Works of Subi Shah, Volume 1 (Open Book Publishers, 2026), for which she is the Project Director, Lead Translator, and author of all Translator’s Introductions. Her previous book, Singing Across Divides: Music and Intimate Politics in Nepal (Oxford University Press, 2017), won the 2019 Bernard S. Cohn Prize for first books on South Asia from the Association for Asian Studies. Anna holds a BA in music and religious studies from Lawrence University in Wisconsin, and an MA, MPhil, and PhD in ethnomusicology from Columbia University. She has also taught at Oxford University, Leiden University, and the New School. Her research focuses on music, dance, language, intimacy, and politics in South Asia, particularly in Nepal, where she has been conducting ethnographic research and learning music since 2000. She performs Nepali folk music as a singer, flutist, and percussionist.

This ongoing research project focuses on translating the works of the late performer and musicologist Subi Shah, and publishing them in thoroughly annotated, open access versions with musical notation and audiovisual recordings to supplement the text. More about this project is available on the project website, PangdureDance.com. Volume 2 is forthcoming in 2027.

One of Anna’s current research projects chronicles the history of Nepal’s politically oppositional “progressive song” from the 1960s to the present, with a focus on ideas of love, development, and communist thought as interrelated ways of imagining a better future. Articles from these projects have appeared in various journals and edited volumes.

The documentary film Singing A Great Dream: The Revolutionary Songs and Life of Khusiram Pakhrin (2019), produced with Bhakta Syangtan as part of this project, won Best International Documentary and Best International Director at the Darbhanga International Film Festival in India.

Anna’s first book, Singing Across Divides: Music and Intimate Politics in Nepal (winner of the Bernard S. Cohn Prize from the Association for Asian Studies) looks at improvised dohori conversational songs as culturally intimate, gendered expressions of ideas of nation, belonging, and heritage, within a cycle of migration and media circulation that spans the globe.

Anna also maintains active research interests in the relationship between music, religion, politics and public culture in South Asia and the Himalayas. 

Along with teaching and researching about music, Anna is also active as a performer. After a bachelor’s degree in western classical flute performance, she has studied Hindustani classical bansuri flute with Steve Gorn and Jeevan Ale, and has learned the folk style of bansuri performance through musical interaction with many Nepali performers during her fieldwork. As a singer, she has studied Hindustani classical singing with Prabhu Raj Dhakal in Kathmandu and Ustad Mehboob Nadeem in London. and she learned Nepali folk and dohori song as she learned the flute styles, in the informal oral tradition. During the course of research on Nepali music Anna learned to perform Nepali folk and dohori songs, improvising rhyming couplets in the Nepali language. She also studied the madal drum more formally with Kharka Bahadur Buda Magar. She has had the good fortune to be invited to perform dohori and Nepali instrumental folk music around the world. In recognition of her performance and research, Anna has been awarded the 2026 Bhanu Puraskar by the Bhanu Pratisthan, and was one of the International Nepali Literary Society’s Navaratna Cheli (9 women honorees). She has received the 2024 Kalibhakta Pant International Folklore Prize from the Kalibhakta-Krishna Pant Foundation; the 2021 Jana Sewa Shree from the Government of Nepal, and the 2016 Ali Miya Prize from the Ali Miya Folklore Academy.