Nira Wickramasinghe is a professor in the department of history and international relations, the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. She grew up in Paris and studied at the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonneand at Oxford University, where she earned her doctorate Among her books are Civil Society in Sri Lanka: New Circles of Power (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks/ Sage, 2001);Dressing the Colonised Body: Politics, Clothing and Identity in Colonial Sri Lanka(New Delhi, Orient Longman, 2003); and Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History of Contested Identities(C Hurst and University of Hawaii Press, 2006).