20 November 2017 12:01 am
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.