Anna Marie Stirr, an associate professor of Asian studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, is the recipient of the 2019 Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies for her book Singing Across Divides: Music and Intimate Politics in Nepal (Oxford University Press, 2017).
The annual award honors outstanding and innovative scholarship across discipline and country of specialization for a first, single-authored monograph on South Asia.
Singing Across Divides examines how forms of love and intimacy are linked to changing conceptions of political solidarity and forms of belonging through the lens of Nepali dohori song. In her book, Dr. Stirr describes dohori as improvised, dialogic singing of witty conversations based on poetic couplets with a fixed rhyme scheme, often backed by instrumental music and accompanying dance, performed by men and women, with a primary focus on romantic love.
Dr. Stirr is a graduate of Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, where she double majored in music and religious studies. She holds two master’s degrees and a Ph.D in ethnomusicology all from Columbia University.