Thushara Hewage
Part-time Faculty
thewage@uottawa.ca
B.A., Modern History, Oxford University, 1996
M.Phil., Oriental Studies, Cambridge University, 2001
M.A., Anthropology, Columbia University, 2003
M.Phil., Anthropology, Columbia University, 2006
Ph.D., Anthropology, Columbia University, 2013
Thushara Hewage is an historical anthropologist of South Asia, whose work focuses on the modern political history of Sri Lanka, foremost its unresolved ‘national question’ of the political rights of minorities. His current book project, provisionally titled ‘Genealogies of the Postcolonial State: Insurgency, Emergency, and Democracy in Sri Lanka’ locates emergency, a defining feature of Sri Lanka’s postcolonial experience, as a phenomenon native to the inception of democracy on the island. He is also working on another project which examines the implications of Britain’s recently discovered and declassified Migrated Archives for conceptualizing colonialism and the ethnography of the archive. His work has appeared in journals such as Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and Comparative Studies in Society and History. He is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Ottawa (currently on leave).
Teaching and Research Interests
Postcolonial political theory; historical anthropology; Sri Lankan and South Asian history and culture; archives documents narrative and historiographic method; colonial modernity and the postcolonial state
