ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr Senel Wanniarachchi is an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Gender Studies of the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he completed his PhD. His research explores how discourses of “culture” and “heritage” appear in colonial archives and persist in contemporary contexts, including digital archives. He is interested in how these narratives are used in frameworks that are anti-imperialist yet simultaneously ethnonationalist, patriarchal, and heteronormative.
His doctoral thesis examined the afterlives of artefacts with relationships to Sri Lanka in British Museums and offered a way to conceptualise “looted” museum artefacts in Western museum cabinets both in relation to historical and ongoing colonial violence, as well as the violence of the postcolonial nation-state towards its minoritised subjects.
His research has appeared in a range of venues including in Cultural Politics and the Routledge Handbook on Contemporary Sri Lanka.
In Sri Lanka, Senel co-founded Hashtag Generation, an activist organisation working at the intersection of human rights and technology. Senel is a member of the Board of Directors of Transparency International Sri Lanka and is a member of the Engenderings Editorial Collective.
Email: senel.wanniarachchi@anthro.ox.ac.uk
Bluesky: http://senelw.bsky.social/
