Profile
Anjuli I. Gunaratne grew up in Colombo, Sri Lanka and received her Ph.D. in English and the Interdisciplinary Humanities at Princeton University. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Hong Kong’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities (2018-2020) and at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, where she was the Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow (2017-2018). Her work has appeared in PMLA (Publication of the Modern Language Association), the CLR James Journal, Research in African Literatures, and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.
Anjuli’s first book, Miraculous Corpse: Tragedy and the Underworlds of Anticolonialism is in press at Duke University Press and slated for publication in 2027. Miraculous Corpse tracks the emergence of a genre of anticolonial poetics that draws from the structures of tragic drama and thought to recover revolutionary figures, political ideas, communities, and ecologies lost to colonial expansion and occupation. The miraculous names, then, a tragically conceived process of poetic invention and historical recovery that is anticolonial in a minor key. As a whole, Anjuli’s research engages issues pertaining to the relationship between literary and architectural form, the narration of trauma, and the process of recovering and representing the past in literary works, particularly when the past is unwritten or purposefully disappeared.
