Nira Wickramasinghe is a historian of the Indian Ocean world and university professor. Her recent books include the award-winning Slave in a Palanquin, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age, Metallic Modern, and Dressing the Colonised Body. She is the recipient of fellowships from, inter alia, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Davis Center at Princeton, the British Academy, and has spent time in New York as a Fulbright Hayes fellow. She grew up in Paris and studied at Oxford where she received her D.Phil in history. She now works and lives in Leiden with her younger son, travelling frequently to Sri Lanka, her land of birth.
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