Faculty and Staff
Augusto Espiritu
Associate Professor of History
Augusto Espiritu is an associate professor in the History Department and is affiliated with the Asian American Studies Program. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA. He is vitally interested in the related problems of American Empire, transnationalism, post-coloniality, and globalization, especially as these have been articulated in the racialized and gendered texts of nationalist, anti-colonial, and ethnic American intellectuals. His book, Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals (Stanford University Press, 2005), examined multiple responses to colonial, national, and racial challenges through the lived experiences and rhetoric of transpacific Filipino writers, who were among the pioneers of Filipino migration to the United States. His articles and essays, dealing with various questions of decolonization, gender, Third world politics, Asian American studies, and cultural criticism have appeared in Amerasia Journal, Diaspora, and Radical History Review, as well as in the collections, After the Imperial Turn (ed. A. Burton) and Multiculturalism in the United States (ed. J. Buenker and L. Ratner). He is currently working on a paper on Filipino American protest politics during the era of the Marcos dictatorship.
Espiritu teaches courses on American Empire, US migration, Asian American studies, and Philippine history, as well as introductory courses on United States history. During the last three years, he has headed the campuswide reading group, “Resistance and Empire,” which has sought to counter hegemonic discourses of Empire by exploring its resistant underside. He has also been involved in seminal discussions on the Filipino diaspora, which have taken him to conferences in Singapore, The Netherlands, the Philippines, and most recently, Japan. His next major project is a comparative study of several generations of Filipino, Puerto Rican, and Cuban transnational, exilic intellectuals in the aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Philippine-American War of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries.