About Me

Professor and Founding Director

Global Asian Studies Program, University of Illinois Chicago, USA

I am a 1.5 Filipinx American born in the Philippines and grew up in California. I am a proud graduate of public schools, with a BA in Women’s Studies and BS in Biological Sciences from the University of California at Irvine and a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco. Before embarking on a winter wonderland adventure Chicago in 2007, I lived in the desert, having taught at Arizona State University, West Campus from 2003-2007.

I have dedicated my career to helping build Asian American Studies at UIC since 2007, first by becoming its director in 2012 and then facilitating the union of Asian Studies and Asian American Studies through Global Asian Studies (GLAS), which I founded in 2016 . Under my leadership, we launched the first major of its kind in the Midwest, the Bachelors of Arts (BA) in Global Asian Studies. I am an interdisciplinary scholar whose intellectual and pedagogical interests are informed by transnational feminist theories, political economy, and critical race/ethnic studies. My body of work has explored the racialization and commodification of immigrant and transnational labor from the Philippines, partly inspired by having come from a family of migrants. Currently, I am working on several projects that focus on exploring the geopolitics of carework at the intersection of science and technology; food and foodways that connect India and the Philippines; as well as mapping the urban removal projects and resistance movements currently underway in Chicago, focusing specifically on the Uptown neighborhood.

I enjoy telling stories through food and travel, learning new languages, sewing, folding origami, and traveling. I enjoy photography and documenting the moments that captivate me. On the pages of this website are photos from some of the places I have been fortunate to visit.