Dr Nadeera Rupesinghe,

Director General National Archives

Dr. Nadeera Rupesinghe oversees the functions of archives management, records management in public authorities, and legal deposit management at the Department of National Archives of Sri Lanka. A specialist in seventeenth and eighteenth century Dutch history, Dr. Rupesinghe is a historian by training.

Dr. Rupesinghe earned her BA (Hons) in history at the University of Colombo before embarking on her postgraduate studies in The Netherlands. In 2007, she obtained a scholarship under the Encountering a Common Past in Asia (ENCOMPASS) programme of Leiden University, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) of the government of the Netherlands, and thereby obtained a BA and MPhil in History from Leiden University.

Thereafter, she was an Assistant in Opleiding (Teaching and Research Assistant) / PhD Candidate at Leiden University, a position funded by NWO. She obtained her PhD in history in 2016.

Dr. Rupesinghe’s book, Lawmaking in Dutch Sri Lanka: Navigating Pluralities in a Colonial Society, was published by Leiden University Press in 2023 and the Sri Lankan edition by Tambapanni Academic Publishers in 2024. She won the Van Caenegem Prize 2020 for a young legal historian, awarded by the European Society for Comparative Legal History, for her article “Do You Know the Ninth Commandment: Tensions of the Oath in Dutch Colonial Sri Lanka,” published in the indexed peer-reviewed journal Comparative Legal History. She has also published articles in Law and History Review, Itinerario, Portuguese Journal of Social Science, and Annales de Démographie Historique on the intervention of the Dutch in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka.