(English) Executive Committee Member
2025.01.16
Dr. Sasanka Perera has been appointed as an executive committee member of the Arts Council of Sri Lanka by Hon. Minister Dr. Hiniduma Sunil Senevi.
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 the Department 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. He was also 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 2022. He writes poetry and engages in photography in his spare time. His collection of poetry in Sinhala, සොයමින් අදිසි මොහොතක් (‘In Search of an Invisible Moment’) was published in 2024.