Ronit Ricci was an International Dissertation Research Fellow (IDRF) in 2002 and IDRF Book Fellow in 2009. Ricci earned BA and MA degrees in Indian languages and literatures and psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Michigan. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at Columbia University and the National University of Singapore and is currently a senior lecturer at the Australian National University in Canberra. Her new research project explores the history and literature of the Sri Lankan Malays, a community descended from political exiles, convicts, and soldiers sent from present-day Indonesia and Malaysia to Sri Lanka during the Dutch and British colonial periods.