Biography

Growing up during Sri Lanka’s civil war and contending with its ethnic conflict as the child of parents from different ethnic minorities, I quickly became familiar with history’s capacity to both exacerbate and/or transform conflict and violence. Working in English and Cultural Studies, my research since the end of the civil war in 2009 has explored how history can be used to challenge received frameworks of analysis and transform the worlds we inhabit into more just, equitable, democratic, and peaceful spaces for all communities in Sri Lanka.In 2016 I completed my MA as a Fulbright scholar at Kansas State University, USA. My dissertation focused on how shifts in definitions of ethnic categories shaped Sri Lanka’s first experience of national-level democracy at the turn of the 20th Century. As a graduate student in History at Cambridge, I build on this work to consider how conflicts over registers of time have shaped articulations of ethnic identifications after the British took control of the entire Island in 1815.

Previous Education

Kansas State University English-Cultural Studies 2016
University of Kelaniya English 2009