Phusathi Liyanarachchi is a Sri Lankan poet. She’s pursuing a Master of Theological Studies at the Harvard Divinity School with a focus on Gender, Sexuality, and Religion. Her research interests lie at the intersections of literature and religious studies with a focus on grief, mourning, psychoanalysis, and gender—especially pertaining to folk or pre-modern literature as well as ritual practice in South Asian contexts.
In her research, she seeks to move beyond canonical and monastic practices of religion to its lived life in literature, ritual, and domesticity—exploring what she terms ‘Sacred Eros’, which she believes provides insight into women’s religiosity. Through this, she delves into the folk domain’s potential to borrow from, rewrite, and subvert dominant traditions, paying careful attention to women’s symbolic expressions, which are most often cast aside from majority culture.
Her work is further enriched by her creative practice as a poet and a translator, where she concerns herself with testing the limits of language, especially the ways in which grief, memory, and the sacred interact in creative spaces. She believes that concerns of “translatability” should take seriously the situatedness of work that we do in multilingual and multi-ethnic contexts.
