Research Expertise and Interest

Philippines, theories of liberalism, history and culture of Southeast Asia, austerity in the global south

Research Description

Lisandro Claudio, an intellectual and cultural historian of the Philippines, is an Associate Professor at the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies and is presently the faculty chair of Berkeley's Center for Southeast Asia Studies.  His book Liberalism and the Postcolony: Thinking the State in Twentieth-Century Philippines (NUS, Kyoto, and Ateneo de Manila Press) received the 2019 George McT. Kahin Prize from the Association of Asian Studies and the 2019 European Association for Southeast Asian Studies Humanities Book Prize. He is also the author of a short book , Jose Rizal: Liberalism and the Paradox of Coloniality (Palgrave), which examines how turn-of-the-century liberalism informed the birth of Filipino literature and nationalism.

His forthcoming book, The Profligate Colonial: How The U.S. Exported Austerity Through the Philippines, 1902-1986 (Cornell University Press), traces the historical and cultural roots of economic conservatism in the Philippines, from the implementation of the gold-exchange standard during the American Progressive Era to the collapse of developmentalism under the Marcos dictatorship. Apart from being a revisionist history of Philippine economics and the American Progressive Era, it is an attempt to foreground textual methods in economic history by examining the relationship between discourses of austerity and colonialism.

Before his appointment at Berkeley, Claudio taught at Ateneo de Manila University and De La Salle University. He was also a post-doctoral fellow at Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies.