© Prof. Neloufer de Mel

Name: Prof. Dr. Neloufer de Mel
Chair: Chair of English Literatures
Institute: Institute of English and American Studies
Faculty: Faculty ofLinguistics, Literature and Cultural Studies

Dr. Neloufer de Mel is Senior Professor of English (Chair) at the Dept. of English, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. The author of Militarizing Sri Lanka: Popular Culture, Memory and Narrative in the Armed Conflict (2007), and Women and the Nation’s Narrative: Gender and Nationalism in 20^th Century Sri Lanka (2001), her recent publications have been on postwar Sri Lanka, providing a feminist, cultural studies perspective on questions of transitional justice, development, security, the law, gender, and art. She has also been the co-editor and/or lead author of several volumes of which Broadening Gender: Why Masculinities Matter (2013), and Reframing Democracy: Perspectives on the Cultures of Inclusion and Exclusion in Contemporary Sri Lanka (2012) constitute her more recent work. 

Prof. de Mel has held several distinguished research fellowships including a Senior Fulbright Research Fellowship at Yale University, USA, where she was also a Postdoctoral Associate in 2009; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship; and visiting fellowships at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, the Universities of Zurich and New York, and the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, USA.

Prof. de Mel is a member of the Board of the Center for the Study of Human Rights and a member of the Research and Development Committee of the University of Colombo.

What are your main interests as a researcher? Which topics do you focus on?

My research interests are in cultural studies, literature, theatre, and gender studies; and my research focuses on Sri Lanka – its ethnic war, its literature and theatre in English, and questions of post-war and gender justice.

What was your most interesting research topic so far?

All the topics I research on have interested me, but I have spent longest studying how Sri Lankan society became militarized in ways that led to its ethnic war (1983-2009) and has continued even after the war ended. I studied the process of militarization in relation to how literature, popular culture, memory and masculinity became sites of ethno-nationalism, and of how women combatants and suicide bombers occupied complex and ambiguous positions in the war. My book Militarizing Sri Lanka was a result of this research, and it was a cultural studies approach to militarization that had not been attempted before in Sri Lanka as a book-length study.

What does your current research focus on?

My current focus is on post-war Sri Lanka: its contemporary literature, theatre and art, and how these engage with what is happening in the country whether of post-war urban development or justice or peace building and social relations.

Which item do you absolutely need at your workplace?

A calm mind – and then my laptop!

Do you have a favourite quote? If yes, which is it and from whom is it?

'To greet someone, you must leave your own place.' Li Qu Li

Which book did you recently read? / Which movie/series did you watch recently?

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Movie – Bohemian Rhapsody  (I just love Queen!)

More information about you can be found:

academia.edu / researchgate.net