Dr Edwin Coomasaru

Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr Edwin Coomasaru

Dr Edwin Coomasaru - orcid.org/0000-0002-7815-7310

Postdoctoral Fellow, March 2022 - August 2022

Home Institution: Association for Art History

Dr Edwin Coomasaru is a historian of modern and contemporary art. He has previously held Postdoctoral and Research Continuity Fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre (2020-22) and the Courtauld Institute of Art (2018-19), where he was also awarded his PhD in 2018. In 2021 he also worked as a Freelance Research Assistant on an anti-racist and decolonial resource portal for the Association of Art History. He co-convenes the Courtauld’s Gender and Sexuality Research Group, and is currently co-editing a book on Imagining the Apocalypse: Art and the End Times for Courtauld Books Online. He has contributed to Third Text, British Art Studies, Oxford Art Journal, The Irish Times, Irish Studies Review, The Irish Review, Photoworks Annual, Burlington Contemporary, Architectural Review, Source Magazine, and the Barbican’s Masculinities (2020) exhibition catalogue.

Project Title: Queer Tropics: Decolonising Sexuality and Ecology in Sri Lanka through Lionel Wendt’s Ceylon (1950) and Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon (1934)

The project will interrogate the relationships between ecology, sexuality and decolonisation in the portrayal of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) by queer Sri Lankan photographer Lionel Wendt and queer British anti-imperialist filmmaker Basil Wright, who collaborated together in the 1930s prior to Sri Lanka’s independence from the British Empire in 1948.