LUMS Wins Times Higher Education Award

LUMS was declared a winner at the Times Higher Education Awards Asia 2022 held in Nagoya, Japan, in the Excellence and Innovation in the Arts category. The winning project, Sikh Virsa Pakistan website has been developed by Dr. Nadhra Khan, Associate Professor at MGSHSS and Dr. Murtaza Taj, Associate Professor at SBASSE. This website aims to highlight Pakistan’s highly valuable but little explored material culture associated with the country’s Sikh heritage by offering an immersive experience of a virtual tour of the Sikh Gallery in Lahore Fort. The tour includes a panoramic tour of the gallery itself and showcases 3D models of Virsa artefacts and the stories associated with them. Therefore, the collections housed in this gallery and presented here offer unique links to connect not only with a significant phase of Punjab’s history but also with the people who made this history and whose memories are etched in the materiality of these objects.

THE Awards Asia offer a major international platform to recognize outstanding leadership and institutional performance, and celebrate the continent's higher education excellence in all of its diversity. The program received nearly 500 entries in total, from all corners of Asia in 2022. LUMS was awarded as one of the winners of the ten categories presented. Sikh Virsa Pakistan stands out as it is an interdisciplinary project which creatively unites cultural heritage and historical research practice with cutting-edge technologies to help bring to life artefacts from Pakistan’s Sikh period, in the process creating new opportunities for collaboration beyond the university.

Describing the initiative as “impactful and collaborative”, the judges said: “Through internal, multidisciplinary collaboration between the computer science and history departments, a new project has emerged—a new but not necessarily exclusive way of looking at and reading history.”

Dr. Nadhra also appreciated the role played by Office of Research during the research process and remarked, “Thank you for facilitating me with extensions and technical support."