Dr. Sasanka Perera is Chairman of the Colombo Institute for Human Sciences, and was Professor of Sociology at University of Colombo, Sri Lanka and South Asian University (SAU), New Delhi. His research interests include contemporary social theory with an emphasis on the idea of culture and its politics, urban space, education, art and visual culture in South Asia, methodological implications of photography, and politics of nationalism and ethnicity. His writings have been published extensively, with some of his works also having been translated into Tamil, Japanese, and Spanish. He is the founding editor of the bi-annual journal Society and Culture in South Asia Journal, co-published by Sage and South Asian University. He is also a poet, photographer, and blogger; his collection of poems and photographs from three countries was published in 2013.

As a Principal Investigator of Heritage as Placemaking, Sasanka Perera leads the theoretical strand of decolonisation (2021–2022) and is conducting research on Buddhist pilgrim trails in Ayodhya, Lumbini, Varanasi, and Bodh Gaya.

Selected publications:

  • Sasanka Perera (2020). The Fear of the Visual? Photography, Anthropology, and Anxieties of Seeing. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.

    Sasanka Perera (2016). Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka: Tales from Darker Places in Paradise. New Delhi and Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE.

    Sasanka Perera, Dev Nath Pathak, and Ravi Kumar (2019). Against the Nation: Thinking Like South Asians. New Delhi: Bloomsbury Academic India.

    Sasanka Perera (2012). Artists Remember and Artists Narrate: Memory and Representation in Sri Lankan Visual Arts. Colombo: Colombo Institute for the Advanced Study of Society and Culture and Theertha International Artists' Collective.

  • Sasanka Perera, Dev Nath Pathak, eds. (2019). Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia: Decoding Visual Worlds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Sasanka Perera and Dev Nath Pathak, eds. (2018). Culture and Politics in South Asia: Performative Communication. New Delhi: Routledge.

    Sasanka Perera, eds. (2015). Violence and the Burden of Memory: Remembrance and Erasure in Sinhala Consciousness. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.