Associate Professor in Architecture, Building, and Planning
University of Melbourne
Anoma Pieris’s specialist focus in postcolonial and subaltern studies methods are applied to the architecture of South and Southeast Asia; more specifically to Sri Lanka and Singapore. Her research is largely governed by postcolonial and subaltern studies methodologies that uncover issues of social inequity in formerly colonial environments. Although concentrated on the Asia Pacific region, she consistently uncovers issues of social disadvantage through the discipline of architecture combining visual analyses with ethnographic methods. She has written on penal labour, Asian and Indigenous Australian communities, gendered or racially differentiated subjects and displaced persons across a number of key publications. These books enter into interdisciplinary international discourses on globalisation, political sovereignty and nationalism by highlighting their physical and spatial impacts. She is the author of Space, Sovereignty and Civil War in Sri Lanka: Porous Nation (2018, in press), Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka: The Trouser Under the Cloth (2012), Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: A Penal History of Singapore’s Plural Society (2009), and Imagining Modernity: the Architecture of Valentine Gunasekara (2007).
Branislav Jakovljević, Claire Tancons, and Anoma Pieris consider how concepts related to self-representation and performativity not only generate sites of resistance, but also recast our perspective on established discourses of the national, ethnic, diasporic, and racial.
