Sasanka Perera is the chairperson of the Colombo Institute for Human Sciences, former Professor of Sociology at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, and the South Asian University (SAU), New Delhi. His research interests revolve around contemporary social theory and politics of culture, urban space, art and visual culture, nationalism and ethnicity, including the politics of education in multi-ethnic societies and the dynamics of teacher training in culturally diverse settings. He has written and published extensively in the English and Sinhala languages, while some of his works have also been published in Tamil, Japanese and Spanish. He is also a poet, photographer, and blogger. His third collection of poetry in the Sinhala language was published in 2024.

His publications in English include Fear of the Visual? Photography, Anthropology and the Anxieties of Seeing (2020); Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka: Tales from Darker Places in Paradise (2016); and Violence and The Burden of Memory: Remembrance and Erasure in Sinhala Consciousness (2015). He has co-written Against the Nation: Thinking Like South Asians (2019). He has co-edited Culture and Politics in South Asia: Performative Communication (2018); Sociology and Social Anthropology in South Asia: Histories and Practices (2018); Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia: Decoding Visual Worlds (2019) and Humour and the Performance of Power in South Asia: Anxiety, Laughter and Politics in Unstable Times (2022).