The AISLS center in Colombo held three workshops in 2013. “Sinhala Light-Classical Song, Sociopolitical Change, and Sinhala Literary Culture in 20th Century Sri Lanka,” convened by Garrett Field, Colombo, August 2013.  This Sinhala-language workshop comprised two panels with papers, each followed…

Over fifty persons attended the 2013 AISLS Annual General Meeting and Reception at the Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, Wisconsin. It was held on Saturday 19 October at 6 PM.  The conference program included around 35 presentations related to Sri…

On 26 September 2013, AISLS sponsored a lecture by Dennis McGilvray on “A House for Every Daughter: Tamil and Muslim Marriage in Sri Lanka Today” at Heartland Community College, Normal, Illinois.  About 80 students attended the talk.  Partial funding for…

“Changing Gender Orders in Sri Lanka: Challenge, Backlash and Change,” convened by Jeanne Marecek, Colombo, December 2012. The workshop brought together 20 scholars, students and employees of NGOs to consider the different ways in which young women from different social…

The pre-conference to the Annual Conference on South Asia was held in Madison WI on Thursday, October 11, 2012.  It featured the most recent manifestations of a film movement called the “third revolution”, whose concerns have revolved around the socio-political…

On 3 May 2012, Garrett Field, the holder of an AISLS language grant, was featured on the “100% A to Z in Youth” program on Derana TV.  The filming was done at the American Institute for Lankan Studies center in…

AISLS held a forum on “Tamil Toronto: Today and Tomorrow,” at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Toronto, 16 March 2012. Toronto is home to some 170,000 Tamils from Sri Lanka, the largest such community outside the…

This workshop, which was held in Siem Reap on 11-13 January 2012, was a joint project between AISLS and the Center for Khmer Studies. The goal was to compare the twentieth-century historical trajectories of the two countries, and consider how…

“Gender and Sexuality Studies in Sri Lanka,” 2011, convened by Jeanne Marecek and Monica Smith. The workshop juxtaposed the practical and experience-based knowledge of practitioners with the theoretically grounded knowledge of academics.