Mark R. Frost
LiVHERe Lead Principal Investigator
Associate Professor of Public History, University College London (UK)
Mark Ravinder Frost is Associate Professor of Public History at UCL, with research interests in war, empire and decolonization in modern Asia, and their place in popular memory. He was educated at the University of Oxford, where he graduated with First Class Honours, and completed his doctorate at the University of Cambridge in 2002.
He is the author of Singapore: A Biography (2009; 2012, co-authored by Yu-mei Balasingamchow) which in 2010 won the Asia Pacific Publishers Association Gold Medal and was selected as a CHOICE ‘Outstanding Academic Title’. This book was based on his work as Content Director and Senior Scriptwriter for the National Museum of Singapore’s award-winning Singapore History Gallery (2006-2015).
Currently, he leads the ongoing War Memoryscapes in Asia Partnership, as well as being Lead PI for LIVHERE. Mark has also been involved in other exhibition design and documentary film ventures. Scene Unseen, his first feature-length documentary (which he wrote, co-devised and co-produced) premiered at the Singapore International Film Festival in February 2021 and won the award for Best Documentary on Music at the Bangkok International Documentary Awards Festival (BKK Docs) in 2022.
Email: m.frost@ucl.ac.uk
Nirmal Dewasiri
LiVHERe Co Principal Investigator
Professor of History, University of Colombo
Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri studied history at the University of Colombo for his BA (1991) and received his MPhil from the same university in 2000, where he serves as a Professor now. He has an Advanced Masters (2002) and a PhD (2007) from the Leiden University, The Netherlands.
He also has a diploma in Conflict Resolution (1994) from Uppsala University, Sweden. He was the Sri Lankan Studies Chair at the South Asia Institute (SAI), Heidelberg University from April to September, 2017. His research interests include, social transformations in colonial societies, historiography and ethno-nationalist ideologies in Sri Lanka, Post-colonial state formation in Sri Lanka and radical political movements.
Darshi Thoradeniya
LiVHERe Co Principal Investigator
Senior Lecturer, University of Colombo
Darshi studied at the University of Colombo for her BA History and MA Women’s Studies, and completed her PhD in History at the University of Warwick in 2014. Her research interests are in the history of medicine, development studies, women's studies and the history of modern South Asia.
Her doctoral thesis examined the strategic place that women’s health has played in Sri Lanka’s twentieth-century history. Sri Lanka gained prominence in international policy circles as an apparent ‘success story’ first as a ‘model colony’ in the early 1950s and later as a ‘development model’ for South Asia by the 1970s. She has published studies on contraception, health, Sri Lanka’s patriarchal welfare state, and development aid in Sri Lanka.
For the LiVHERe project, she is collaborating with Nirmal Dewasiri to examine the remembrance of the JVP’s violent heritage, inclusive heritage activism in Sri Lanka’s east, and the documentation of the History and Community project.
Edward Vickers
LiVHERe Co-PI
UNESCO Chair on Education for Peace, Social Justice and Global Citizenship, Kyushu University, Japan
Edward began his career as a teacher and textbook author working in Hong Kong and Beijing before embarking on an academic career. After almost a decade at the Institute of Education in London (now part of UCL), he moved to Kyushu University in 2012. He is the author and editor of many books on the history and politics of education in contemporary Asia, including (with Zeng Xiaodong) Education and Society in Post-Mao China (2017), and (with Krishna Kumar) Constructing Modern Asian Citizenship (2015). He has also helped coordinate two major reports for UNESCO: Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century (2017) and Reimagining Education (2022), both published by UNESCO's Mahatma Gandhi Institute (MGIEP).
In addition to his work on education, Edward has written extensively on public history and the politics of identity in Asian societies. He co-edited (with Paul Morris and Naoko Shimazu) Imagining Japan in Postwar East Asia: identity politics, schooling and popular culture (2013) and (with Mark R. Frost and Daniel Schumacher) Remembering Asia's World War Two (2019). With Mark Frost, he co-edited a 2021 special issue of Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus on 'The Comfort Women as Public History', and with Shu-Mei Huang and Hyun Kyung Lee, he co-edited the 2022 volume, Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific: Difficult Heritage and the Transnational Politics of Colonial Nationalism (published by Hong Kong University Press).
As well as being a core member of WARMAP team, Edward is currently working on the LIVHERE project, investigating the relationship between education, public history and conflict and peace in contemporary Sri Lanka. He is also working on a project examining the politics of education and public history relating to communities on the periphery of Chinese society.
Email: edvickers08@googlemail.com
Hasini A. Haputhanthri
LiVHERe Senior Researcher
Cultural Sociologist, Museologist, Sri Lanka
Hasini Haputhanthri is a Sri Lankan development professional, arts manager, curator and artist. She’s involved in a global network of researchers and practitioners on historical dialogue and reconciliation. Initially trained as a sociologist at Delhi University India and Lund University Sweden, she then also specialized in Oral History and Museum Anthropology at Columbia University New York.
Finishing her 10-year stint with Deutsche Gesellschaft fr Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), Hasini now works as an independent consultant and researcher. Amongst her notable publications are Archive of Memory: reflections on 70 years of independence in Sri Lanka (2019, co-authored with Malathi De Alwis) and Museums, Memory and Identity Politics in Sri Lanka (2021). Hasini is also part of the Bosch Alumni Group that founded the World Art and Memory Museum and has been its overall curator and project lead since its inception.
Daniel Schumacher
LiVHERe Senior Researcher
Lecturer, Binational School of Education, University of Konstanz (DE)
Dr. Daniel Schumacher is a historian who works in both the secondary and higher education sectors. He trains future teachers at the Binational School of Education, University of Konstanz (Germany) and serves as Head of History at Schloss Gaienhofen, a nearby private school.
Previously, he was a research fellow, network coordinator, and visiting scholar, respectively at the Universities of Hong Kong (CN), Essex (UK), and Notre Dame (US). Daniel’s research interests focus on transnational/global and public history, history didactics, and digital education. He has been a long-standing core member of WARMAP and, for over a decade, has been researching 20th century war memory in Asia, its politicization and globalization.
He is the co-editor, with Mark R. Frost and Edward Vickers, of Remembering Asia’s World War II (2019) and, with Stephanie Yeo, of Exhibiting the Fall of Singapore (2018). More recently, he co-authored a series of History school textbooks in Germany that now also include major Asian history segments. As part of the LivHERe- project, he explores the role of education in reconciliation processes in post-civil war Sri Lanka.
Neluni Tillekeratne
LiVHERe Senior Researcher
Research Consultant
Neluni Tillekeratne has a multi-disciplinary background in the development sector with a recurring focus on government reforms and post-war reconciliation. Neluni currently serves as project manager/research consultant of the LivHERe project. She is the former Head of Research at World Vision Lanka, Co-National Director of Sri Lanka Unites and Sri Lanka consultant for the Centre for International Development at Harvard University.
Neluni has also worked with national ministries and local government institutions in all 9 provinces specifically on policy reforms to promote equity in resource allocation. In 2019, she was awarded a Chevening Scholarship by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office to pursue an MSc. in Conflict, State-building and Development at the University of Birmingham (UK). Her current research interests include predicting Climate Conflict in Sri Lanka and the effectiveness of peacebuilding movements in the country over several years.
Lasni Buddhibhashika
LiVHERe Researcher
PhD Candidate, Kyushu University
Lasni Buddhibhashika Jayasooriya is a PhD candidate at Department of Education, Kyushu University, Japan who researches politics in language policies in post-war Sri Lanka. She is also exploring Sri Lankan school curricula in general and education’s impact on post-war reconciliation. She has an MSc degree in Development Communication from the Postgraduate Institute of Agriculture, University of Peradeniya, and she also spent a year affiliated to Saga University, Japan.
She has two other master's degrees, namely MTESL (Open University) and MA in Sociology (University of Kelaniya), and has published research papers in the fields of education, sociology and cultural studies. Having started her professional career as a teacher, she then worked as a school curriculum developer (for Sri Lanka’s NIE) and teacher trainer. Before embarking on her PhD, she was an administrative officer at the University of Peradeniya.
Email: lasni.mck@gmail.com
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