Bhagya Senaratne

Postdoctoral Fellow of Global Asia | Center for Global Asia, New York University

Bhagya Senaratne is a postdoctoral fellow of Global Asia at the Center for Global Asia, New York University (NYU) Shanghai. She was previously a senior lecturer (U.S. associate professor) in the Department of Strategic Studies at General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University (KDU) in Sri Lanka. Her research at the Center for Global Asia focuses on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in South Asia, focusing on vernacular literature. She researches and teaches on areas related to foreign policy analysis (Sri Lanka, China, United States), diplomacy, strategic communications and maritime security.

Dr. Senaratne has served on several editorial boards such as the Journal of Defence & Policy Analysis and the Defence and Security Journal, of which she was the editor-in-chief in 2021. She co-edited Pakistan-Sri Lanka Relations: A Story of Friendship in 2017 and Sri Lanka’s Post-Independence Defence Policy: Past, Present and Future Projections in 2023. She has a podcast with the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR), USA and writes for the Stimson Center’s South Asian Voices on Sri Lanka’s foreign policy.

Among the awards and honors received, Dr. Senaratne was the recipient of the U.S. Department of State’s Alumni Engagement Innovation Fund (AEIF) Award in 2020, the U.S. Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) in 2019, and the 22nd Ship for World Youth Programme awarded jointly by the Cabinet Office of Japan and the United Nations University in Tokyo, Japan in 2010, to name a few. She is an alumna of the University of Colombo, the Indian Institute for Mass Communication (IIMC), the Geneva Center for Security Policy, the China Institute of International Studies (CIIS), the Near East and South Asia Center (NESA), the IVLP and SWY. Dr. Senaratne was a visiting scholar at the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing, China in 2017. She received her PhD in international relations from the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka.