Sharika Thiranagama

Sharika Thiranagama is an associate professor of anthropology and a co-director of the IRiSS Center for Global Ethnography at Stanford University. Thiranagama also serves as the president of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and as an elected director of the American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies. She holds a BA from St John's College Cambridge and an MSc and PhD from the University of Edinburgh.

Thiranagama’s research has focused on various aspects of the Sri Lankan civil war. Primarily, she has conducted research with two different ethnic groups, Sri Lankan Tamils and Sri Lankan Muslims. Her research explores changing forms of ethnicisation, the effects of protracted civil war on ideas of home in the midst of profound displacement, and the transformations in and relationships between the political and the familial in the midst of political repression and militarization. She is currently undertaking new research on postwar life in the Jaffna Peninsula, as well as a second fieldwork project examining three generations of transformation among agricultural workers in Kerala, South India.