Faculty & Staff

M. Neelika Jayawardane is Associate Professor of English at SUNY-Oswego. She was born in Sri Lanka, grew up in a mining town in Copperbelt Province, Zambia, and completed her education in the United States. Her Ph.D. is in English, with a focus in Creative Writing, from the University of Denver, Colorado. At SUNY-Oswego, she teaches transnational memoirs, and contemporary fiction, film and visual art connected to the immigrant and postcolonial experience, including contemporary Southern African and South Asian work. She writes for the  online journal Africa is a Country, and is a visiting fellow at the American Centre for Sri Lankan Studies (AISLS) and the Centre for African Studies in the University of Cape Town.
Link to her class webpages here.

Recent publications focus on the body and landscapes as sites of inscription, on which corporation and nation attempt to exert ownership and control via a multitude of immigration laws and body-policing techniques.

Recent Peer-Reviewed Publications:

•·         "Learning the Cartography of Terror: South African Literature in the post-9/11 American Classroom." Social Dynamics: Scripted Bodies. 37: 2. 2011.

•·         "Impenetrable Bodies/Disappearing Bodies: Fat American Celebrities, Lean Indigenous People, and Multinational Pharmaceuticals in the Battle to Claim Hoodia gordonii." Popular Communications. 9: 2. 2011.

•·         "Ambiguous Bodies, Authentic Bodies: Terrorists, Passports, and Immigration Law in the Post 9/11 World." Current Writing: Law and Literature in Southern Africa. 22: 2. 2010.

 Other Scholarly Essays:

•·         "'Everyone's Got Their Indian': The South Asian Diaspora in South Africa". Transition 107.

•·         "A Question of Agency: Asylum Narratives, Power, and the 'Maid from Guinea.'" JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies (forthcoming).

•·         "David Goldblatt's Photography in Manhattan's Jewish Museum." SAVVY: art.contemporary.african (forthcoming).

•·         "Queering the Congo: Richard Moss' Photography": Africa is a Country. November 2011.

•·         "Returns: 60 Years of David Goldblatt's Photography." The Johannesburg Salon. Volume 3 2010.

The photograph was taken off Bantry Bay, Cape Town, by Italian photographer Emilia Ciccone.