Biography

Nira Wickramasinghe is Chair/ Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University. She grew up in Paris and has a D.Phil in modern history from the University of Oxford (1989). Before moving to Leiden, she worked in the Department of History at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Her research centers on issues of belonging and everyday life under colonialism in Sri Lanka and the Indian Ocean. Some of her recent books include: Slave in a Palanquin. Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka (Columbia University Press 2020) – that was awarded the J.F Richards 2021 Prize in South Asian History by the American Historical Association and more recently Monsoon Asia. A Reader on South and Southeast Asia (2023) co-edited with David Henley. She has been, inter alia, a member at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, a Fellow at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, a British Academy Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford and a Fulbright Senior Scholar at New York University.

At the EUI, Nira Wickramasinghe will be working on a reflective introductory chapter of her book on Slavery and Forgetting in the Indian Ocean World. This book will be the capstone of a large NWO (Dutch Research Council) 2023-2027 project she is heading entitled Forgotten Lineages. Afterlives of Dutch Slavery in the Indian Ocean world .