People
Faculty
Contact Information
Contact information
322 Bachelor Hall
Oxford Campus
513 529 4839
jayasen@muohio.edu
Nalin Jayasena
Title
- Assistant Professor
Education
- Ph.D., English, University of California at Riverside. March 2003
- M.A., English, University of California at Riverside
- B.A., English, University of California at Riverside
Teaching Interests
- Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures of South Asia
- Postwar British Literature
- Postcolonial British Literature
- British Imperial Literature
Research Interests
- British Literature
- South Asian literature and its diaspora
Selected Publications
- Contested Masculinities: Crises in Colonial Male Identity from Joseph Conrad to Satyajit Ray. New York: Routledge, January 2007.
- “Clubs and Concubines: Imperial Masculinity in George Orwell’s Burmese Days.” Under consideration for publication in ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.
- “Desire and the Buddhist Doctrine of Renunciation in Martin Wickramasinghe’s Viragaya” in Navasilu: Journal of the English Association of Sri Lanka (18).
- Review of Ranjini Obeyesekere’s Sri Lankan Theater in a Time of Terror in The Journal of Asian Studies 59:2 (July 2000)
- Review of Shyam Selvadurai’s Cinnamon Gardens in World Literature Today 73:4 (Autumn 1999)
Work In Progress
Professor Jayasena is currently developing a project that deals with the politics of embodiment in Sri Lanka.
Tentatively titled Ethnicity and the Politics of the Body in Postcolonial Sri Lanka, this project explores how Sri Lanka’s civil war has thrust the bodies of its citizens into the public eye as their corporeality supersedes more conventional ethnic markers such as linguistic differences. In a political climate where distinctions between the Tamil Tiger and the Tamil or a Tamil and a Sinhala are neither always discrete nor always discernible, bodies of all Sri Lankans raise varying degrees of suspicion and are subject to numerous forms of surveillance. He hopes to demonstrate that on the part of both communities is a desire to equate political differences, which are putatively at the root of this conflict, with physiological characteristics. In other words, the official rhetoric generated by both parties in the conflict largely aims to polarize the two communities and to ground difference in the body; however, a significant amount of scholarship suggests that such overarching physiological markers do not exist. It is this absence of a bodily index of difference that produces a crisis in the body politic regarding what constitutes the other.
On December 5, 2007 Professor Jayaysena presented a paper entitled “Where Have All the Tamils Gone? Ethnicity and the Body in the Films of Prasanna Vithanage” in the English Department Works-in-Progress Series.
He is also in the process of organizing a film series on contemporary Sinhala cinema tentatively scheduled for spring 2009.