Rate My Professor Yasmine Gooneratne

Yasmine Gooneratne is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Humanities at Macquarie University, where she held a personal chair in English. Educated at the University of Ceylon and Cambridge University, she earned a PhD in English literature from Cambridge in 1962 and received Macquarie University's first Doctor of Letters (DLitt) in 1981. She relocated to Australia in 1972, joining Macquarie University and advancing through positions to full professor over three decades. Gooneratne founded and directed the Centre for Post-Colonial Literature and Language Studies, playing a key role in developing postcolonial literary scholarship.

Her academic interests include eighteenth-century English literature, Jane Austen, Alexander Pope, and postcolonial literatures with a focus on Sri Lanka and South Asia. Notable publications encompass scholarly books on Jane Austen and Alexander Pope issued by Cambridge University Press, novels such as A Change of Skies (1991), The Pleasures of Conquest (1995), and The Sweet and Simple Kind (2008), poetry collections including The Lizard’s Cry, Word, Bird, Motif, and Celebrations and Departures, and Celebrating Sri Lankan Women's English Writing: 1948-2000 (2002). She co-authored This Inscrutable Englishman: Sir John D'Oyly, Baronet, 1774-1824 (1999) with Brendon Gooneratne. Gooneratne founded and edited the journal New Ceylon Writing from 1970 to 1983, and edited anthologies like Stories from Sri Lanka and Poems from India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore (1979). Other works include Masterpiece and Other Stories (2002) and the chapter Fabricated Stereotypes: Asia in the Australian Imagination (2009). Her achievements were recognized with the Officer of the Order of Australia in 1990 for services to education and literature, the Raja Rao Award in 2001, Sri Lanka’s Sahithya Ratna Award in 2008 for lifetime achievement, and the Premchand Fellowship by Sahitya Akademi of India in 2011. She also served in editorial roles, such as for the Journal of Commonwealth Literature.