Harshana Rambukwella
Visiting Professor, Literature and Creative Writing
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: BA Peradeniya, PhD The University of Hong Kong
Research Areas: Literature, History, Nationalism, South Asia, Sociolonguistics
Harshana Rambukwella is a comparative literature and cultural studies scholar with an interest in the intersections between literature, history, aesthetics, and nationalism in South Asia. He is also a sociolinguist with interest in critical sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. Rambukwella is the author of the Politics and Poetics of Authenticity (UCL Press 2018) and has published in journals such as boundary 2 and the Journal of Asian Studies and Interventions and is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Sociolinguistics and serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Rambukwella is currently working on a project on the 'cultural life of democracy,' looking at democracy in 'everyday life' as expressed in cultural and aesthetic artifacts. This work is partly funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, and he also serves as a Project Fellow on the Reversing the Gaze team — an interdisciplinary multi-sited project attempting to interrogate how insights from the postcolonial world can be usefully employed in the analysis of populism and anti-democratic thinking in Europe.