Neloufer de Mel

Neloufer de Mel is a professor of English at the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka and a feminist scholar.

As a child, she attended Bishop's College, a private girls' school in Colombo. 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".

In 1999, de Mel was awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant; in 2009 she was a Fulbright Scholar at Yale University; and in 2019 she was a Dresden Senior Fellow at TU Dresden.

Much of her work has focused on cultural studies of postwar Sri Lanka from a perspective of feminism, justice, and the arts.

Works Books Women and the Nation's Narrative: Gender and Nationalism in Twentieth Century Sri Lanka (2001) Militarizing Sri Lanka: Popular Culture, Memory and Narrative in the Armed Conflict (2007)