Research Bio

Vernadette Gonzalez is a cultural studies and ethnic studies scholar whose research explores militarism, tourism, and empire in the Pacific. She is best known for her books Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines and Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper, which examine how race, Indigeneity, gender, and sexuality intersect and operate, sometimes together and sometimes in opposition, in the cultural terrains of empire. Gonzalez’s scholarship integrates cultural theory, feminist studies, and postcolonial critique to understand how empire operates through and in a register of intimacy, particularly through the production of consent and hospitality upon which it relies. Her research contributes to transpacific, decolonial, and feminist scholarship.

She is Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Her work has been published in journals including American Quarterly, Radical History Review, and Critical Ethnic Studies and edited collections on empire and the Pacific. She is co-editor of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai‘i and Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader, the former of which anchors a decolonial guide series at Duke University Press. At Berkeley, she teaches courses on empire, militarism/demilitarization, Filipinx narratives of empire, and Asian American cultural studies. 

Research Expertise and Interest

Asian American literacy and cultural studies, culture of U.S. Imperialism, gender and sexuality, Philippine and Filipino American studies, transnational American studies