Sharika Thiranagama is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her first set of research has examined the Sri Lankan civil war through the perspectives of two different ethnic groups, Sri Lankan Tamils and Sri Lankan Muslims. Her research explores changing forms of ethnicization, the effects of protracted civil war on ideas of home in the midst of profound displacement and the transformations in and relationships between the political and the familial in the midst of political repression and militarization. Her second set of research is in the Palakkad district of Kerala, South India. She has carried out fieldwork with female Dalit agricultural laborers and writes on the transformations of public and private life in Kerala, agrarian economies and caste histories, legacies of enslavement, and Dalit political and social mobilization within everyday life.