PAMUDU TENNAKOON

I am an interdisciplinary scholar of (post)colonial urban built environments. I hold a PhD in History of Art and Architecture from Brown University as well as an MA in Anthropology.

Sparked by the recent demolition of a colonial shophouse complex in Colombo, Sri Lanka, my current book project, titled “Material and Memory: Rewriting Colonial Architecture from Rubble in Contemporary Colombo,” explores the afterlives of colonial buildings. My work combines ethnography, architectural history, heritage studies, and ruin theory to reveal the concrete ways in which people of Colombo understand, rewrite, and negotiate their identities in relation to their colonial pasts amidst ongoing processes of architectural destruction.

My work has been supported by the Social Sciences Research Council, the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, Society of Architectural Historians, and Brown University.