Board of Directors
Nira Wickramasinghe
Nira Wickramasinghe is Chair and Professor of Modern South Asian studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands and was Director of Research at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies from 2018 to 2020. Before taking up her post in the Netherlands in 2010, she was with the Department of History and International Relations at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Her latest book, Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka is published by Columbia University Press (November 2020). Trained as a historian, she has written on late colonial and modern Sri Lanka using a variety of archives. Her current research on enslaved people detaches Lanka from the subcontinent to insert the island in the Indian Ocean world. Some of her earlier books include: Sri Lanka in the Modern Age. A History (Oxford University Press, 2015); Metallic Modern: Everyday Machines in Colonial Sri Lanka (Berghahn, 2014), L’Invention du Vêtement National au Sri Lanka (Karthala, 2006); Dressing the Colonised Body (Orient Longman, 2003); Civil Society in Sri Lanka (Sage, 2001). She has been, inter alia, a Fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University (2008-2009), British Academy Visiting Professor (2005) at the University of Oxford and Fulbright Senior Scholar at ICAS, New York University (2003-2004). She studied at the Université de Paris-IV Sorbonne and received her D.Phil in modern history from the University of Oxford.
Nira Wickramasinghe is the Chairperson of TAP.
Contact: niraw@tambapannipublishers.lk
Sasanka Perera
Sasanka Perera is the Founding Professor of Sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi and Chairman of the Department of Sociology. He was the University’s Vice President from 2016 to 2019 and the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences from 2011 to 2018. Prior to this, he was with the Department of Sociology, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. He is the Editor in Chief of the journal, Society and Culture in South Asia co-published by South Asian University and Sage. His publications in English include, Fear of the Visual? Photography, Anthropology and the Anxieties of Seeing (Orient Black Swan, 2020); Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka: Tales from Darker Places in Paradise (Sage, 2016); Violence and The Burden of Memory: Remembrance and Erasure in Sinhala Consciousness (Orient Black Swan, 2015); Culture and Politics in South Asia: Performative Communication (co-edited with Dev Nath Pathak, Routledge, 2018) and Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia: Decoding Visual Worlds (co-edited with Dev Nath Pathak, Palgrave MacMillan 2019). He has co-written With Ravi Kumar and Dev Nath Pathak Against the Nation: Thinking Like South Asians (Bloomsbury, 2019). He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Contact: sasankap@tambapannipublishers.
Karnika Jayatilake
Karnika Jayatilake is an Attorney-at-Law of the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka counting three decades of experience at the Bar. She holds a Masters’ Degree in Law from the University of Southampton (United Kingdom) and a Bachelors’ Degree in Arts from the University of Colombo in English, Economics and Political Science. She is a senior corporate lawyer who has worked in both the public and private sectors. She has also worked as short-term consultant with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.
Contact: karnikaj@tambapannipublishers.
Coralie Pietersz
Coralie Pietersz is an Independent Non-Executive Director of Seylan Bank PLC, People’s Leasing and Finance PLC and Bogala Graphite Lanka PLC. She is an Associate Member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and a fellow member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Sri Lanka. She has a Bachelor of Science Degree (Hons) in physics from the University of Sussex and holds an MBA from Heriot-Watt University. She counts for over 25 years of experience in corporate finance, accounting and auditing at senior levels, across several industries in both private and public sectors. She is a member of the Council of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Sri Lanka.
Contact: coraliep@tambapannipublishers.