Neloufer de Mel is a professor of English at the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka and a feminist scholar.[1]
As a child, she attended Bishop's College, a private girls' school in Colombo.[2] She holds a PhD from the University of Kent, where her 1990 dissertation was entitled "Responses to History: The Re-articulation of Postcolonial Identity in the Plays of Wole Soyinka & Derek Walcott 1950–76".[3][4]
In 1999, de Mel was awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant;[5] in 2009 she was a Fulbright Scholar at Yale University;[6] and in 2019 she was a Dresden Senior Fellow at TU Dresden.[7]
Much of her work has focused on cultural studies of postwar Sri Lanka from a perspective of feminism, justice, and the arts.[7] She has written extensively on the militarization of Sri Lankan society during the quarter-century of ethnic war, and its lingering effects after the war's end.[7]
De Mel is also interested in multidisciplinary studies of gender, literature, film, and performance art and has served on juries for literature and film prizes and festivals.[3]