Scholar appointed as Director General of National Archives

Dr. Nadeera Rupesinghe has been appointed Director General of the Department of National Archives.
Dr. Rupesinghe began her studies in history (Honours) at the University of Colombo and passed with a Second Class (Upper). She obtained an Encountering a Common Past in Asia (ENCOMPASS) scholarship from 2007 to 2010 for a postgraduate qualifying year BA and Research MA at the Institute for History at Leiden University, which she passed with distinction.
Thereafter she was an ‘Assistant in Opleiding’ (AIO/PhD candidate) at the same institute, a position funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Leiden University Fund. She obtained her PhD in January 2016.
Her PhD was on Legal Pluralism in eighteenth-century Galle under Dutch rule. She has published on land rights in the Portuguese Journal of Social Science and has other pending articles in indexed peer-reviewed journals.
Dr. Rupesinghe has studied hitherto unused sources in the Dutch language to write a nuanced history of judicial practice in the eighteenth-century.
She was previously attached to the Faculty of Engineering Technology at the Open University of Sri Lanka before taking up the position at the archives.