FASS News
Welcome new senior lecturer Anushay Malik
We are delighted to welcome Anushay Malik as our new Senior Lecturer in Global History and Community-Engaged Pedagogy for the School for International Studies and the Global Asia Program. Hailing from Pakistan, Malik is a dynamic social historian whose unconventional academic journey ignited her passion for history—in particular social history, which explores the everyday lives of people and what drives them.
Anushay Malik’s path to academia was far from typical. She initially pursued a pre-med track in her hometown of Lahore before entering art school and law. It was a history course, taken while enrolled in law studies, that led her down a new path. “It returned me to the elements that had always mattered: stories and their role in shaping our identities and sense of belonging,” she shares.
She trained as a South Asian historian at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), an institution historically attended by colonial officials to learn about the regions they were tasked with colonizing. Even so, SOAS had more resources on South Asia than were available in her home country of Pakistan, and Malik became captivated by narratives often overlooked by those in power. She recalls questions that came to mind: “What are the stories we miss when we focus solely on politicians and religious leaders, yet which are so central to understanding how we construct meaning in our everyday?”
Her research delves into the lives of industrial workers, Pakistan’s Christian minority, and bonded labourers in the brick kilns of Punjab. Employing a research methodology that intertwines government archives, newspapers, oral histories, autobiographies, and police reports, she explores how storytelling shapes and reflects power dynamics.
Her academic career has also embraced community engagement. Malik has guided students and community groups in British Columbia to collect and preserve oral histories. These contributions are now housed in institutions like the Burnaby Village Museum, the BC Labour Heritage Centre, and the South Asian Canadian Digital Archive.
Malik’s research focus on South Asian labour movements was grounded in her younger days as a student activist organizing against a military dictatorship in Pakistan. Hunger strikes, protests, and feminist poetry readings allowed her to meet many people from across the country. Her formative years instilled a profound interest in how people imagined their positions in the world and what they think is possible for themselves and their communities.
Reflecting on this period, Malik notes, “It became increasingly evident—especially as I was living through it—that the experience of thousands of individuals successfully working to oust a military dictator had fundamentally altered perspectives such that people had begun to believe in the importance of gathering together in public space.”
At SFU, Malik embraces the interdisciplinary nature of International Studies, where she connects global themes of inequality, colonial legacies, and power to local contexts in British Columbia. “Students in IS come into class excited to learn about the world around them in a way that focuses on themes like global inequality, colonial legacies and power,” she says.
Malik is currently teaching IS 313W: Nationalism, Democracy, and Development in Modern India, a course she describes as a personal favorite, and IS 101: Global Challenges of the 21st Century: An Introduction to International Studies.
Beyond teaching, she is advancing two major research projects. The first investigates the experiences of female South Asian farmworkers in rural BC, conducted in collaboration with the BC Employment Standards Coalition. The second, still in its early stages, examines Muslim migration to British Columbia. She is also involved in a collaborative pedagogical project in which a group of artists, curators, and K-12 educators reflect on the call by critical feminist scholars like Bell Hooks and Gayatri Spivak to rethink what is considered 'canonical' literature in classrooms.
Malik’s new position as Senior Lecturer in Global History and Community-Engaged Pedagogy is exciting for the School for International Studies, as her innovative scholarship and commitment to community engagement promise to inspire both students and faculty alike.