Malathi de Alwis


Malathi de Alwis is a feminist scholar and activist at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka. She also teaches in the MA Program in Women's Studies at the Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Colombo and was Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research, New York City, previously. She is currently coordinating a multi-sited, multi-lingual, multi-disciplinary research project entitled: "Post-Tsunami Reconstruction in Contexts of War: A grassroots study of the geo-politics of Humanitarianian Aid in Northern and Eastern Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia."
De Alwis earned her Ph.D. in Socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago, where she was a founding member of the Women Against War Coalition and a winner of the Ruth Murray Memorial Prize for Best Essay in Gender Studies. She is also a poet and short story writer and has been involved in several film projects. She has for many years contributed to an anonymous feminist column, Cat's Eye, which is published every Wednesday in the English daily, The Island.

Research

De Alwis describes her research interests in the following manner:
"Much of my early work focused on gender, nationalism, militarism and resistance culminating in my dissertation research on the conditions of possibility of motherhood in political protest in Sri Lanka. I have extended my concern with these issues in two slightly different trajectories at present: re-thinking feminist peace activism in Sri Lanka, especially how the category of the 'political' is constituted, mobilized and re-iterated and interrogating the categories of suffering and sentiment — initially explored in conjunction with the category of motherhood — within the broader context of humanitarian aid in times of conflict and the more recent tsunami which devastated vast swathes of the coast of Sri Lanka."

Selected Publications/Books