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Professor Maithree Wickramasinghe

Cadre Chair and Senior Professor of English

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Department of English
K 2 102
University of Kelaniya
Sri Lanka
BIO
Maithree Wickramasinghe (PhD) is the Chair and Senior Professor of English at the Department of English and the founding Director of the Centre for Gender Studies (CGSUK) at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. She has been a visiting academic at a number of universities in Sri Lanka and abroad including the Centre for Higher Education Equity (CHEER) at the University of Sussex (UK) and the M A in Women’s Studies Program of the University of Colombo during her academic career spanning 35 years.
 
Her research spans a number of subjects / disciplines as evinced by her numerous publications which include Fatalities: Accidents, Suicides, and Femicides of Women and Girls in Sri Lanka co-authored with Anuruddhi Edirisinghe and Manikya Kodithuwakku (2021); Towards Gender Equity / Equality: A Scan of Gender Sensitive Laws, Policies, and Programs (2012); Feminist Research Methodology – Making Meanings of Meaning Making (2010); Beyond Glass Ceilings and Brick Walls – Gender at the Workplace, co-authored with Wijaya Jayatilake (2006); Gender Dimensions in Disaster Management co-authored with Madhavi Malalgoda Ariyabandhu (2003/2005) (translated into Urdhu, Hindi, Tamil and Sinhala). She is also the author of From Theory to Action - Women, Gender and Development (2000).
 
Professor Wickramasinghe was an Associate Editor of the Wiley Blackwell Encyclopaedia on Gender and Sexuality Studies (2016) which runs into five volumes. Other work includes an influential training module An Introduction to Gender Mainstreaming Universities (2010) for the Association of Commonwealth Universities, UK as well as a collection of poetry titled Unexpectedly launched in 2025.
 
An expert on gender, she is a scholar whose work interfaces research, teaching, training, keynote-speaking, policy development, evaluation, advocacy, and activism. She counts over thirty years of experience in formulating gender equity and equality polices/strategies, conducting gender sensitization trainings, and evaluating women’s and gender programs for local and international organizations.
 
She has served on the Board of Trustees of the Asian University for Women (AUW) based in Bangladesh and the Gender Advisory Group for the Gender Program of the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU). She was appointed a Champion of the ‘Commonwealth Says No More’ (a pan-Commonwealth platform that addresses gender inequality/inequity and injustice relating to women) by the Commonwealth Secretariat in London. She has also served on the Advisory Council of SANGAT – a South Asian Feminist Network based in India, the Standing Committee on Gender Equity and Equality of the University Grants Commission (UGC) of Sri Lanka, and the Governing Board of the Women’s Education & Research Centre in Colombo.
 
In 2023, she was awarded an honorary professorship by the Faculty of Arts, Business, and Social Sciences of the University of Wolverhampton in recognition of her research, training, evaluation, and policy work on gender equity and equality.
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