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 Chairman of the Colombo Institute for Human Sciences (www.colomboinstitute.lk). He taught sociology at University of Colombo from 1993 to 2011 and at South Asian University from 2011 to 2024. He was Head of Sociology at University of Colombo from 2009 to 2011 and the Founding Professor Sociology and the Founding Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at South Asian University from 2011– 2018 and again from 2021-2022 and the University’s Vice President from 2016 to 2019.
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). He has co-edited Culture and Politics in South Asia: Performative Communication (2018); Sociology and Social Anthropology in South Asia: Histories and Practices (2018); Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia: Decoding Visual Worlds (2019) and Humour and the Performance of Power in South Asia: Anxiety, Laughter and Politics in Unstable Times (2022).
In addition, he has also translated into Sinhala Jostein Gaarder’s novel, Vita Brevis: A Letter to St Augustine (2019), Hisashi Inoue’s play, Face of Jizo (2016) and has co-translated a collection of 150 poems by the 13th century Persian poet, Jalal Ad-din Muhammed Rumi to Sinhala as තුටින් පිරී ගිය එක් මොහොතක්: ජලාල් අද්-දින් මුහම්මද් රූමිගේ තෝරා ගත් කවි (2022, ‘A Moment Filled with happiness; Selected Works of Jalal Ad-din Muhammed Rumi’), which won the Sri Lanka State Award for the Best Translation of Poetry in 2023. His Translation of Lucas Hnath’s play, A Doll’s House, Part 2 won the Sri Lanka State Award for the Best Translation of a Play in 2024. He writes poetry and engages in photography in his spare time. His collection of poetry, සොයමින් අදිසි මොහොතක් (‘In Search of an Invisible Moment’) in Sinhala was published in 2024.
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.