Name: Dr. Shermal Wijewardene
Chair: Senior Lecturer
Institute: Department of English, University of Colombo
Faculty: Arts

What are your main interests as a researcher? Which topics do you focus on?
My main research interests broadly encompass queer, LGBT, feminist and human rights topics across literature, cinema, the media, health, law, the digital, and social movements.

What was your most interesting research topic so far?
It was on how autonomous Sri Lankan women’s organizations understand their advocacy role in raising the profile of lesbian, bisexual, and trans (LBT) issues

What does your current research focus on?

• Visual politics and strategies in feminist campaigns against sexual and gender-based violence in Sri Lanka
• Heteronormativity and the narration of Sri Lanka’s civil war, the nation, and national subjectivity in contemporary Sri Lankan Anglophone literature
• Health-related discourses on the intersections of drug use and non-normative sexuality and gender in Sri Lanka

Which item do you absolutely need at your workplace?
A laptop, wifi…and tea! :)

Which book did you recently read? / Which movie/series did you watch recently?
Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North (2021), Laura Carlin, The Wicked Cometh (2018) ; My Happy Family (2017), I Lost My Body (2019), System Crasher (2019)

More information about about you can be found:

• Twitter: @SWijewardene
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/shermal.wijewardene/