Udeni Samarasekara

Biography

Dr Samarasekara is a Classicist and Indologist. She specialises in Ancient Greek, Roman and Indian Literature and History, focusing on their relationship with popular culture. From 2011-2013 she was a guest-lecturer in the Comparative Literature department at King’s College, London where she taught postgraduate courses on ‘Oral Epic’ (the Homeric corpus and its ancient Indian and Tibetan counterparts) and ‘Reception theory’. She is currently working on a research project entitled, “The Silk Road: Highways of Communication”. It studies how the Silk Road was a market–place for the exchange of ideas and how these roads of dialogue engendered the cross-cultural transference of literature (i.e. story-telling) from East to West & vice versa starting in 356 BC (Alexander the Great connects Europe to Central Asia) and culminating in 917 AD (the Chinese Tang dynasty links China directly to the West for land-based trade). Udeni is a polyglot, conversant in English, Sinhala, French, Italian, Spanish and Classical languages. Prior to her career in academia, she was a senior Corporate Communications professional consulting to many of the world’s largest brands including Microsoft, Motorola and T-Mobile.

Research Interest

Literature