Speakers
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Fuzzy States: Reflections on Digital Repatriation and Digital Colonialism
Ramon Guillermo
Center for International Studies
University of the Philippines Diliman
Ramon Guillermo is the director of the Center for International Studies (CIS) at the University of the Philippines Diliman. His current research projects are on the transmission, dissemination, reception, and translation of radical texts and ideas in Southeast Asia using techniques and approaches from translation studies and digital humanities. He is the author of several books which include “Translation and Revolution: A Study of Jose Rizal’s Guillermo Tell” (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2009), “Pook at Paninindigan: Kritika ng Pantayong Pananaw” (Site and Standpoint: A Critique of Pantayong Pananaw) (UP Press, 2009) and the novel “Ang Makina ni Mang Turing” (Mister Turing’s Machine) (UP Press, 2013). He was the Faculty Regent of the University of the Philippines from 2019 to 2020. He is also one of the initiators of the Network in Defense of Historical Truth and Academic Freedom.
Research Fellows for 2023
Social Biography of Northern Luzon Artifacts at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford: From Archives to the Field
By Analyn Salvador-Amores
The Pitt Rivers Museum, the ethnographic museum of the University of Oxford, is home to a collection of two-hundred five (205) artifacts from the Philippines in general, of which one-hundred twelve (112) are specific from Northern Luzon, Philippines. The diverse artifacts include adornments, textiles, weapons, utilitarian objects, among others that were acquired by its founding director, Augustus Lane Fox Pitt Rivers in 1913; and some were donated by scholars and field researchers. Of interest is the William Turnbull collection of anthropomorphic wooden spoons, wooden bowls and other ornaments apparently from neighboring Ifugao ethnolinguistic group, with geographic proximity to Nueva Vizcaya (but labeled as Ilongot) in the catalogue. Turnbull was an American lieutenant assigned in the Philippine Constabulary in the early 1900s. In an initial assessment of the 205 artifacts online, the catalogue lacks the proper annotation, inaccurate geographic provenance, and relations of objects to indigenous groups in Northern Luzon: on how they were used, the purpose and relevance of these to the way of life of the various indigenous groups. Hence, an in-depth study of these artifacts warrantees further examination by employing Arjun Appadurai’s framework on the social biography of objects which entails following the object, the people and the story by connecting these museum objects to the origin communities that once produced them. The digital repatriation of these objects shall elicit new narratives that can be included in the archival data to bridge gaps in information. These new narratives can provide deeper understanding by utilizing firsthand field data from cultural bearers in Northern Luzon, Philippines.
Bio
Analyn Salvador-Amores, PhD is professor of Anthropology and former Director of the Museo Kordilyera at the University of the Philippines Baguio. She has curated exhibitions for the museum since 2015 to the present. She earned her doctorate in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Oxford University, UK. She is the Project Leader of the CORDITEX (Cordillera Textiles Project) composed of an interdisciplinary team conducting research on textiles in Northern Luzon. Her research interest includes non-Western aesthetics, anthropology of the body, material culture, ethnographic museums and colonial photography in the Philippine Cordillera. Included in her work is the award-winning book: Tapping Ink, Tattooing Identities: Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Kalinga Society (UP Press, 2013). She continues to carry out anthropological fieldwork among the indigenous communities in Northern Luzon, and have published extensively on this subject.
Reel Optics of War: Newsreels and Wartime Philippines, 1942-1945
By John Adrianfer Atienza
Over the years, moments of the past were documented not only by means of written accounts but also through the visual medium. Moving pictures or films generally register events of historical significance that, as various scholars have argued (Smith 1976; White 1988; Rosenstone 1988; 1995; 2006), emit and provide an alternative, if not unique, windows to the past. In this idea, the films’ nature and power of image and sound perform as new and critical testimonies of history that, in most cases, are never found in written accounts. The newsreel, also known as news films or actualities, is of particular interest within these visual avenues. First seen in theatres in 1908, newsreels are films that exhibit new stories issued regularly in the first part of cinema programs (Chambers et al. 2018; Hiley & McKernan 2001; McKernan 2008). Newsreels present actual shots of a nation’s culture, including local politics, wars and conflict, environmental spectacles, and images of daily life. Thus, they can be processed as valuable sources and primary windows to the past, documenting almost the entire twentieth century through the lens of an optical device (Turkoglu 1993). However, despite the apparent power of the newsreel, including the emergence of movements in the 1970s that attempted to locate the newsreel and film within the realm of historical evidence (Pronay 1976; 1977; 1983; Kaye 2018), scholars and historians continue to ignore the visual medium in historical studies, resulting to only a handful being published (Short 1988; 1993; Higashi 1998; Centeno Martín 2017, 2020; Atienza 2021).
The current study plans to contribute to this scholarly gap. It uses newsreels as avenues of historical discourse, approaching the visual medium as a vital source of Philippine wartime history (1942-1945). Following this, the study detects two connected arguments. Initially, it surveys the nation during wartime via the lens of newsreels. In this sense, the newsreel visual history registers vivid pictures of the wartime Philippines from 1942 until the end of the Pacific War in 1945, including prewar essential moments and postwar recovery stages. Hence, it envisions constructing a chronological and visual archive that presents the Philippine wartime history via collecting and outlining newsreels that render events during the focused period. But more so, the study also offers a critical articulation of the war newsreels. As most studies about war newsreels have argued, these visual sources are not ingenuous as it appears to be. Within its visual and filmic spaces are several colonial and imperialist discourses, cinematic messages, and visual politics linked with the colonial and postcolonial relations of the Philippines and the United States. Employing postcolonial criticism (Capino 2002), the study treats the newsreels as texts and plans to detect these colonial and imperialist discourses, nuances, subtleties, and meanings in the filmic space, uncovering them through lines of historical criticism, textual-contextual-intertextual analysis, and diagnostic-symptomatic reading (Dale 1937; Barthes 1983; Turkoglu 1993; Kellner 1995, 93-122; Deocampo 2008, 68-71; Rutherford 2021, 452-460). Ultimately, it attempts to offer an alternative approach to the wartime history of the Philippines via newsreels. Not to counter, alter, or revise the established narrative, which was mainly based on written accounts, the study wishes to contribute and add another layer of historical understanding by employing visual sources, like the newsreel, about wartime Philippines and the more extensive visual history of the nation.
Bio
John Adrianfer Atienza is a graduate of Bachelor of Arts in History from the Polytechnic University of the Philippines. He currently studies MA in Philippine Studies at the Asian Center, University of the Philippines Diliman. His essays and research articles have appeared in Tala Kasaysayan: An Online Journal of History (2019, 2022) of the University of Santo Tomas, Humanities Diliman (2021) of the University of the Philippines, Kino Punch (2021) of UP Cinema, and Southeast Asian Media Studies Journal (2021) of Southeast Asian Media Studies Association (SEAMSA). He has also participated and spoken at international conferences: Philippine Historical Association (2020, 2021), Southeast Asian Media Studies Association (2021), and International Conference of Asian and Philippine Studies (2023). He is a faculty member of the Department of Social Studies of Marist School Marikina.
Listening to Internal Difference in Early Ethnographic Recordings of Asian Music
By Lisa Decenteceo
How did late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century ethnologists “hear” the various musics of Asia? This question remains largely unanswered in music scholarship in the Philippines due to a postcolonial nationalist preoccupation with essentialized Western/-non-Western binaries that categorize these musics as “indigenous” or “world music.” This tendency hinders consideration of the subtle, yet significant, ways that early researchers distinguished among “oriental” sounds. Studies by Spencer (1890), Wallaschek (1893), and Densmore (1901), for instance, positioned diverse “primitive” musics on an evolutionist ladder based on Western theories about timbre, melody, pitch, rhythm, and form that do not accommodate the immense variety of Asian musics and their extra-musical underpinnings. Prompted by the pervasiveness of these views while adapting Mary Talusan’s “imperial ear,” I scrutinize ethnographic recordings of music in select Asian regions, their context, scope, technology, and nature, alongside supporting archival materials to demonstrate that ethnologists of the time conceived notions of internal difference as they analyzed the music of Others. My project foregrounds how prejudice, be it ethnic, racial, or both, intricately operates through the documentation of sound, and fosters awareness of its present-day manifestations. I advocate understanding “native” musical expressions in their own right toward rethinking practices of sound archiving, curation, and repatriation.
Bio
Lisa Decenteceo is an ethnomusicologist and Fulbright scholar who studies emergent sonic expressions of indigeneity, which she began exploring while she earned a PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation “From Being to Becoming: Protests, Festivals, and Musical Mediations of Igorot Indigeneity” won the Judith Becker Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Research in Southeast Asia. Lisa has presented in conferences by the International Council for Traditional Music, the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, and the Society for Ethnomusicology. She serves as an associate editor for the peer-reviewed Musika Jornal and is a contributor for a forthcoming book on Indigenous studies in the Philippines. Lisa has taught courses on musicology, art music, American music history, and Indigenous music, and presently teaches various musicology courses at the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Music. She has collaborated with the UP Center for Ethnomusicology for repatriation and extension projects.
Imperial Networks and Planetary Expedition: data creation on the Philippines and the Pacific through the H.M.S. Challenger and S.M.S. Gazelle
By Lemuel Magaling
Since Magellan’s circumnavigation in 1521, several hundreds of ships sailed to trade with the indigenous population on the small islands in the Pacific. Important exchanges, not just of goods and materials, contributed in the development of planetary knowledge. Imperial longing and colonial research on economic potentials as well as political rivalries, form the relation of scientific expeditions that dictate epistemic authority sanctioned by distant rulers in European capitals. After colonising the land and seas, European state-sanctioned expeditions that yielded data on oceanic regions from the Atlantic to the Pacific followed suit. European entanglements from the completion of the first circumnavigation of earth’s spatial limit, was followed by scientific explorations that had impact on data generation through colonial networks in pursuit of planetary expeditions. Connection between naval power and planetary research remains a less discussed aspect of colonial science. Later expeditions in the late 19th century to the early 20th century signalled the exploration beyond terrestrial spaces, but also the depth of deep-sea trenches, alongside the utilisation of upper-air data through aerological research in colonising spaces covering vast geographic and oceanographic locations. In the wake of the German empire, two expeditions demand attention—the H.M.S. Challenger from 1872-1876 and the S.M.S. Gazelle Forschungsreise in 1874-1876. Naval cooperation, network and information exchange were prevalent during planetary explorations which constituted early scientific research and resource exploration. Historical study of the scientific knowledge production on the archipelago and surrounding islands contributed in forming colonial networks that later served in shaping geopolitical interests and inter-imperialist dynamics. This archival research aims to organise the information about the Philippines in the Pacific expedition of the H.M.S. Challenger to bridge using British archival sources the gap in the study of the scientific network of empires.
Bio
Lemuel Magaling is a DAAD scholar on German Colonial Rule, currently writing his dissertation at the Bonn International Graduate School-Oriental and Asian Studies. His research is about the impacts of German Colonial Rule in the regional politics of Southeast Asia and South Pacific, exploring European entanglement in the Pacific Politics, which includes Anglo-German cooperation and rivalry. His M.A. Thesis is about the comparison between 20th century political thinkers in Indonesia and the Philippines using methods in digital humanities.
"Cannot leave a place unsearched": Hugh Cuming and Colonial Philippine Botany
By Jessica Nicole Ramas Manuel
My research aims to shed light on untouched narratives in the history of colonial Philippine botany, paying particular attention to the natural specimens acquired by British botanist Hugh Cuming from his travels to the Philippines between 1836 to 1840. Existing studies on colonial Philippine botany and natural history have explored the significance of both religious and secular contributions to the field. For one, the manuscripts of the Jesuit botanist Georg Josef Kamel (1661-1706) are part of an important nexus of scientific exchange between scientists and avid natural history collectors from Europe (one of them being Hans Sloane) during the 17th century. (Reyes 2011) The secular Spanish institution, Jardín Botanico de Manila also maintained connections with British botanists under the directorship of Sebástian Vidal y Soler, evidenced by the correspondences and material specimens stored at the Library and Archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. (Guiterrez 2020) The research aims to uncover an overlooked corpus of botanical material through an investigation of the inter-imperial intellectual exchanges that took place between local and foreign actors in two distant colonial empires – Great Britain and Spanish Philippines. It also considers what impact these collaborations had on the later development of colonial Philippine science.
Bio
Jessica Nicole Ramas Manuel is a member of faculty from the Department of Art Studies (College of Arts and Letters) at the University of the Philippines Diliman. She graduated from the University College London with a Bachelor of Arts degree in History of Art with Material Studies, and has been a recipient of the Laidlaw Research Scholarship – an intensive undergraduate research programme, from 2017 to 2020. Since graduating, Jessica has worked as a Museum Project Assistant at the College of Home Economics (CHE Museum), as well as an archivist at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines. She has also presented in various conferences, such as the ARCO Research Colloquium (UP College of Architecture), Sabang (Asian Studies), Benilde Arts Management (College of St. Benilde), and the Bahaginan Research Forum (UP College of Arts and Letters) amongst others. Alongside her teaching, she is also taking up her Masters in Curatorial Studies at the same department.
The Servicio Sanidad de Filipinas, 1920s–1941
By Aaron Rom O. Moralina, Ph.D.
Servicio Sanidad de Filipinas was the public health and welfare bureaucracy of the Philippines in late U.S. colonial period. Already ran by Filipino doctors, the Sanidad was an administrative evolution from the carceral-at-default sanitary system established by the U.S. Army doctors who were guided by the logics of military tropical medicine. I trace the Sanidad’s inception to the 1920s when efforts to expand health statecraft outside the capital Manila took off. Contrary to Filipino nationalist triumphalism, a functional shift in the “state effect” of health functionaries, as well as a move away from socially restrictive disease abatement measures actually created conditions for the Sanidad’s success. Other factors also came into play: an international trend that placed emphasis on rural health and social medicine; the emergence of new effective health technologies such as cholera vaccine and neosalvarsan; and a realization among Manila-based policymakers that investments on curative medicine would meet the U.S. Insular Government’s manifold political goals. By the eve of the Pacific War, the Philippine Sanidad became a regular feature of Filipino social life. A great number of Filipino government doctors were actively serving throughout the country, embedded in a downstream health policy infrastructure that linked the capital Manila to the provinces and municipalities. The country’s medical profession was the biggest in the Far East next to Japan.
Bio
Born and raised in the Philippines, Dr. Aaron Moralina was a member of Ateneo history faculty for many years before heading to the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa for Ph.D. in History studies. In 2022 he successfully defended his dissertation entitled, “Health, Welfare, and a Nation-in-Transition: The Philippine Sanidad in the Late U.S. Colonial Period,” which I am working to turning into a publishable form. Currently residing in the U.S. Midwest, he keeps in touch with activist and academic friends in Pinas who keep him abreast on current affairs.
Zamboanga:Landscape,Flora,Fauna and its Peoples
By Felice Noelle M. Rodriguez
Zamboanga is a city on the peninsula in the western part of Mindanao. It punctuates the peninsula’s southwestern tip. Forming its story are multiple cultural encounters: among the local peoples – Subanen, Lutao, Kalibugan – and then with Spanish military personnel, missionaries, troops, runaway or redeemed slaves and captured, and foreign merchants – Chinese, Europeans, American and others.
Maps and images help track Zamboanga’s narrative of transformation from a Spanish garrison outpost settlement to a city where the routes of indigenous, Western, and East Asian worlds meet. In the context of its geographical space and through historical time we shall meander through different maps, interspersing it with narratives and images (illustrations and photographs) from the Subanen and Lutao, from visitors, missionaries, redeemed slaves, journalist artists that give us snippets of life from different perspectives, never giving us an entire broad picture, but allowing us to make sense of lives and interconnections.
Texts and images of peoples and landscapes, flora and fauna remind us that this Philippine creole not only emerges from a physical and human geography but also from the movements, settlements and intercourse of peoples at that crossroads. It shows us that culture is organic and ever changing. The Zamboanga and its peoples are changing, adapting and continuously reinventing – language, clothing, architecture, dances and songs, performances.
Bio
Felice Noelle Rodriguez is Visiting Scholar at the Ateneo de Zamboanga University. Former chair (2000-2003) and associate professor of the Department of History, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines. She holds masters and doctoral degrees in History from the University of the Philippines. She published works on warfare, the early Christian missions, nationalism and urbanization. She has curated exhibits tracing diverse historical concerns: Revolutionary press, Philippine postcards and the history of Zamboanga. She continues her research on the Malay World, Global Trade Systems, Warfare and Connections in the Nusantara region. She is currently working on a Visual History of Zamboanga.
Recent Publications:
“Who Speaks for Zamboanga? ‘Nawan before Zamboanga’, ‘Subanin’ before the Fort’”
1521 Revisited, The Quincentennial Commemorations in the Philippines, Volume II.
Manila: National Historical Commission of the Philippines, 2023.
“Making of a Multicultural City: Zamboanga at the End of Spanish Colonialism.” In Transfiguring Mindanao: A Mindanao Reader, edited by Jose Jowel Canuday and Joselito Sescon, 33-47. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2022.
“Mapping the Growth of Zamboanga.” The Murillo Bulletin, Journal of PHIMCOS, The Philippine Map Collectors Society, no. 13 (May 2022): 23-51.
“Zamboanga: Its Interconnectedness and Multi-Histories.” In PAGBANUG: Sailing Through ZAMBASULTA History and Culture, compiled by Ayshia F. Kunting, 3-14. Quezon City: Central Book Supply, Inc., 2022.
The Brief Colonial Attempt of the French Naval Asiatic Squadron in Basilan: A Maluso Sojourn 1843 – 1845
By Ahmad Shaid J Sallim
This paper presents an overview of an unknown part of history of the Sulu Archipelago, involving mainly the history of Basilan. Mainstream writings and research about European Colonialism during the 19th century on the maritime Sulu Archipelago usually connoted three commonly held themes: War, Destruction, and Religion. The lack of an in-depth study about the central role of diplomacy, negotiation, and a series of treaties and agreements between the European Colonialists and the Sulu Archipelago Natives is included in this paper. The paper revisits the brief French colonial attempt on Basilan in 1843 up to 1845; the central role of the De Lagrene Mission, the Sultan of Sulu and Ruma Bichara, the active participation of the Basilan datus to the negotiation, Spain’s sideline observation, the British and American neutral positions, by which their collective actions greatly shaped the event and topic about to be discussed. We tracked the history of France’s attempts to colonize Basilan; the causes and effects, and relate the reasons behind the numerous foreign and local historical records, autobiographies, and related pieces of literature. In addition, this paper outlined the chapters leading to the event.
Bio
Ahmad Shaid Jundam Sallim was born and raised in Basilan during the height of the island’s socio-political unrest in the late 1990’s. He finished Bachelor of Arts in Asian Studies at Western Mindanao State University in Zamboanga City, Philippines. A law student and a writer, he started his passion in reading and writing since he was very young. He started writing pieces of literature and submitted online in the Bangsamoro Online Literary Reviews and the National Commission for Culture and Arts. The desire to redefine Basilan’s tumultuous past drive his passion to write his experiences about the island’s culture and its people. He is currently working on his project about writing the local history and the conservation of the cultural heritage of Basilan. He is now associated with the leading writers and ethnographers in his localities in both Basilan and Zamboanga, and one of the co-founders of Basilan Studies Center.
Associate Fellows
Cheree Quizon
Cheree Quizon is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice at Seton Hall University. She studies the knowledge systems and social formations relating to the textiles and dress of the Bagobo, one of several indigenous peoples of the Davao region, Mindanao, the Philippines. She has published widely on US colonial-era museum collections examined through the lens of contemporary fieldwork in the origin community, with comparative research into related traditions among T’boli and Blaan including Visual Anthropology Review, Ethnology, and Southeast Asia Research. She contributed to scholarly volumes, directed video, and participated in symposia as part of key museum exhibitions including the Asia Society (New York), the Fowler Museum, Musée du quai Branly and the Asian Art Museum. Primarily interested in indigenous semantic categories of cloth and dress, ongoing interdisciplinary collaborations using isotope methods to study the dispersal of textile banana fiber as well as developments in the Philippine Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA) continue to broaden her inquiry. Along with Seton Hall colleague Anne Giblin Gedacht, she received a grant from the NJ State Office of the Secretary of Higher Education to pursue interdisciplinary research integrated with undergraduate teaching in the disciplines of History and Anthropology conceived within a Digital Humanities framework. The project’s focus on researching hidden voices and “cultures of disaster” examined through the lens of social media platform Twitter/X using case studies of Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan in 2013 and the Tohoku triple disaster in 2011 builds on prior explorations of teaching technologies implemented in undergraduate courses that range from qualitative research methods to linguistic anthropology.
Anne Giblin Gedacht
Anne Giblin Gedacht is an Associate Professor of Japanese History at Seton Hall University in the United States. She received Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015 in History. Her research focuses primarily on the social and cultural history of modern Japan from 1852-1953, and her interests include Japanese migration, ex-patriot identity, disaster studies, dark tourism, and nation-building. She has held affiliated research positions with Waseda University, the University of Manila de Ateneo, National University of Singapore, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, and Akita International University. She is author of Tohoku Unbounded: Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Prewar Japan (Brill, 2022) and has published articles in the Journal of Social History, Japan Studies Review, and Journal of the Institute for Asian Studies and Regional Collaboration. Currently, she is working on a new book project, tentatively titled From Everywhere and Nowhere: Japanese Ex-Patriot Identities in the Era of Globalism, that explores expressions of national identity among individuals who transcend multiple nationally-bounded spaces during their lifetimes.
Book Launch
Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines
by John D. Blanco
In Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines, the author analyzes the literature and politics of “spiritual conquest” in order to demonstrate how it reflected the contribution of religious ministers to a protracted period of social anomie throughout the mission provinces between the 16th–18th centuries. By tracking the prose of spiritual conquest with the history of the mission in official documents, religious correspondence, and public controversies, the author shows how, contrary to the general consensus in Philippine historiography, the literature and pastoral politics of spiritual conquest reinforced the frontier character of the religious provinces outside Manila in the Americas as well as the Philippines, by supplanting the (absence of) law in the name of supplementing or completing it. This frontier character accounts for the modern reinvention of native custom as well as the birth of literature and theater in the Tagalog vernacular.
Bio
John D. (Jody) Blanco teaches modern Philippine, Latin American, and Asian-American literatures, with a focus on the literatures and cultures of early modern globalization under the Spanish Empire (Philippine, Latin American, and Asian), at the University of California, San Diego. His current research and book manuscript engage in the “co-invention” of Philippine Christianity and native custom in the literature of spiritual Conquest in the Philippines between the 16th-18th centuries, which highlights the processes of counter-Hispanization and the law as phantasmagoria. He is the author of Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the 19th Century Philippines (UC Press, 2009) and the translator of Julio Ramos, Divergent Modernities of Latin America: Culture and Politics in the 19th Century (Duke UP, 2001). He has also edited two special issue journals: one on the political philosopher Carl Schmitt in the study of the early modern Americas (Política común v.5) and the second on Colonialism-Capitalism-
Incomplete Conquests: The Limits of Spanish Empire in the Seventeenth-Century Philippines
by Stephanie Joy Mawson
In Incomplete Conquests, Stephanie Joy Mawson uncovers the limitations of Spanish empire in the Philippines, unearthing histories of resistance, flight, evasion, conflict, and warfare from across the breadth of the Philippine archipelago during the seventeenth century. The Spanish colonization of the Philippines that began in 1565 has long been seen as heralding a new era of globalization, drawing together a multiethnic world of merchants, soldiers, sailors, and missionaries. Colonists sent reports back to Madrid boasting of the extraordinary number of souls converted to Christianity and the number of people paying tribute to the Spanish Crown. Such claims constructed an imagined imperial sovereignty and were not accompanied by effective consolidation of colonial control in many of the regions where conversion and tribute collection were imposed. Incomplete Conquests foregrounds the experiences of indigenous, Chinese, and Moro communities and their responses to colonial agents, weaving together stories that take into account the rich cultural and environmental diversity of this island world.
Bio
Stephanie Mawson is a research fellow at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa and a former research fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge. She received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 2019, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar and a fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. As an historian of empire in maritime Southeast Asia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, her work focuses on questions of Indigenous agency, resistance, and sovereignty in the face of European imperial expansion, as well as global connections across Pacific and Indian Ocean worlds. She has published in leading historical journals including Past & Present, Ethnohistory, and The American Historical Review.