Neloufer de Mel

Neloufer de Mel is a professor of English at the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka and a feminist scholar.{{cite web |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oudSJTo1eno |title=Feminist Methodologies for Research on Masculinities in Sri Lanka |date=December 2009 |publisher=International Institute of Social Studies |access-date=17 May 2020}}

As a child, she attended Bishop's College, a private girls' school in Colombo.{{cite news |url=http://www.island.lk/2005/07/24/features2.html |newspaper=Sunday Island |title=Prof. Neloufer de Mel on English Teaching |date=14 July 2005 |access-date=17 May 2020}}

She holds a PhD from the University of Kent, where her 1990 dissertation was entitled "Responses to History: The Re-articulation of Postcolonial Identity in the Plays of Wole Soyinka & Derek Walcott 1950–76".{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=h0f_D1qiXQgC&pg=PA284 |page=284 |title= Women & the Nation's Narrative |first=Neloufer de |last=Mel |publisher=Rowman & Littlefield |year=2001 |isbn=9780742518070}}

In 1999, de Mel was awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant;{{cite web |url=https://www.macfound.org/grantees/5361/ |title=Grantees: Mel, Neloufer de |publisher=MacArthur Foundation |access-date=17 May 2020}}

in 2009 she was a Fulbright Scholar at Yale University;{{cite web |url=https://wrg.macmillan.yale.edu/fellows |title=Women, Religion & Gender: Fellows |publisher=Yale University |access-date=17 May 2020}}

and in 2019 she was a Dresden Senior Fellow at TU Dresden.{{cite web |url=https://tu-dresden.de/gsw/der-bereich/news/prof-neloufer-de-mel-dresden-senior-fellow-am-institut-fuer-englische-literaturwissenschaft?set_language=en |title=Prof Neloufer de Mel – Dresden Senior Fellow at the Chair of English Literatures |publisher=Technische Universität Dresden |date=10 April 2019 |access-date=17 May 2020}}

Much of her work has focused on cultural studies of postwar Sri Lanka from a perspective of feminism, justice, and the arts.

She has written extensively on the militarization of Sri Lankan society during the quarter-century of ethnic war, and its lingering effects after the war's end.

De Mel is also interested in multidisciplinary studies of gender, literature, film, and performance art and has served on juries for literature and film prizes and festivals.{{cite web |url=http://dscprize.com/2015/10/16/neloufer-de-mel/ |date=16 October 2015 |title=Neloufer de Mel |publisher=DSC Prize for South Asian Literature |access-date=17 May 2020}}