Welcome to my website! My name is Nira  Wickramasinghe and I’m a historian of the Indian Ocean world and  university professor at Leiden University. I recently discovered that  the world wide web has no images of my very first  book published in 1995. They have simply disappeared. So, I thought of  collecting and putting information about my writing in a single space.  My most recent books are easier to locate (but for how long?); they include the award-winning Slave in a Palanquin (AHA  prize for South Asian History), Sri Lanka in the Modern Age, Metallic Modern and Dressing the Colonised Body.    

I have traveled quite a bit over the years thanks to various fellowships,  inter  alia, at the Institute for Advanced Study, the Davis Center at  Princeton, the British Academy at Oxford, the EUI F. Braudel fellowship  in Florence. I also spent time in New York as a Fulbright Hayes fellow.  To explain where I am from is always a tad complicated:  I was born in Colombo, grew up in Paris and studied at Oxford where I  received a D.Phil in history. After 19 years teaching at the University of Colombo,  I work and live in Leiden with my younger son, traveling frequently to Sri Lanka where apart from working at the National Archives, I also enjoy meeting friends and family and taking a dip in the Indian Ocean!