Sasanka Perera  is the Chairman of Colombo Institute for Human Sciences and Director at Tambapanni Academic Publications.  He was the founding professor of Sociology at the South Asian University, New Delhi from 2011 until his retirement in July 2024. In the same university, he was the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences from 2011 to 2018 and again from 2021 to 2022 and the Vice President from 2016 to 2019. Prior to that he taught at the University of Colombo for 19 years.

Trained as a cultural anthropologist he has engaged in multi-disciplinary subject areas in Sociology and Anthropology. His research interests span cultural and political analysis, education, language politics, visual cultures, urban space and migration. Broadly speaking, his main interest lies in contemporary social theory with an emphasis on the idea of culture and politics. He has written extensively and published both locally and globally in English and Sinhala languages.

Click for more information

His publications in English include: Fear of the Visual? Photography, Anthropology and the Anxieties of Seeing (2020); Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka: Tales from Darker Places in Paradise (2016); and Violence and The Burden of Memory: Remembrance and Erasure in Sinhala Consciousness (2015). He has co-written Against the Nation: Thinking Like South Asians (2019) and co-edited Humour and the Performance of Power in South Asia: Anxiety, Laughter, and Politics in Unstable Times (2022); Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia: Decoding Visual Worlds (2019) and Sociology and Social Anthropology in South Asia: Histories and Practices (2018). In addition, he has also translated into Sinhala Jostein Gaarder’s short novel, Vita Brevis: A Letter to St Augustine (2019) and Hisashi Inoue’s play Face of Jizo (2016) and has co-translated a collection of poems by Jalal Al-din Rumi to Sinhala (2022). His poetry collection in Sinhala, සොයමින් අදිසි මොහොතක් (In Search of an Invisible Moment) was published in 2024.