Natassja B. Gunasena immigrated to the United States as a student in 2007 from Dubai, U.A.E. Originally from Sri Lanka, her desire to theorize racial formation and gender in South Asia through a transnational framework brought her to the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin where she completed her Ph.D. in 2019. Both a creative and scholastic writer, her pedagogy emphasizes expressive and artistic responses, informed by interdisciplinary critical frameworks, to sociopolitical phenomena. She is currently at work on a monograph tentatively titled “Cobra Women: Race, Gender and Bio-Visualities of the Asian South” that explores linkages between visual cultures, race science, sexuality and nation-building in the late 1800s through the mid-to-late 1900s.

curriculum vitae