Samitha Senanayake

Position title: TA Assistant Director of the Writing Center

Pronouns: she/her

Year Admitted: 2017

Bio

Samitha Senanayake is a PhD candidate in Literary Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her BA in English from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka and an MA in Literary Studies from Miami University of Ohio. Her research focusses on literary critical frameworks that engage with universalism and difference through a combination of Buddhist and secular thinking emerging from the writing of 20th Century Sri Lankan anglophone scholars and writers. She is also interested in thinking about criticism and the critical in the context of Writing Center pedagogy and the exchange of knowledge on culture specific and transnational approaches to writing.

Interests

South Asian Anglophone Literature, Buddhist thought and culture, Literary Critical Theory

Degree and Institution

Miami University of Ohio
University of Peradeniya

Selected Publications

Senanayake, S. “Narrating the Buddhist No-Self in Sri Lanka: A Reading of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost” . Phoenix: Sri Lanka Journal of English in the Commonwealth. Colombo, Sri Lanka. 2017

Viera, K, Heap L, Descourtis, S, Isaac, J, Senanayake, S, Swift, B, Castillo, C, Kim, A.M, Krus-Shaw, K, Black, M, Oladipo, O, Young, X, Ratanapraphart, P, Tiwari, N, Velarde, L and West, G.B . “Literacy is a Sociohistoric Phenomenon with the Potential to Liberate and Oppress” . In: (Re) Considering What We Know: Learning Thresholds in Writing, Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy, edited by L. Adler-Kassner and E. Wardle . University Press of Colorado. 2019