About

Headshot of Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez
Photo Credit: Brandon Sanchez Mejia

Professor of Ethnic Studies

Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies

Asian American literary and cultural studies, Cultures of US Imperialism, Gender and sexuality, Philippine and Filipino American Studies, Transnational American Studies

I’m a writer and teacher. My day job is Professor of Ethnic Studies and Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, the place where I got my doctorate degree a long, long time ago. Before coming back to the East Bay, I taught at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa for seventeen years, the longest I’ve lived anywhere, and a place that I think about through the relationships and community that I thought and fought alongside with. 

I write about cultures of U.S. empire, mostly about tourism and militarism, in Asia and the Pacific. I approach empire through both larger stories of place, practice, and power, but also through more intimate and complex stories of people. My first book, Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines (Duke 2013) is about the ways that modern military and touristic ideologies, cultures, and technologies of tourism and militarism converge in sites touched by U.S. empire. My second book, Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper (Duke 2021) is an exploration of the intimacies of imperial geopolitics through the life story of a mixed-race vaudeville and film actress and sometime mistress of General Douglas MacArthur.

Bangtan Remixed coeditors in concert
Photo Credit: Inez Amihan Anderson

I love to collaborate on projects, and have been lucky enough to do so with fierce feminist scholars. I’ve co-edited, with Jana K. Lipman and Teresia Teaiwa, an American Quarterly (2016) special issue on the convergences of tourism and militarism. With Hōkūlani K. Aikau, I’ve helped bring the collection Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i (Duke 2019) into the world: Detours curates alternative, place based narratives, art, and itineraries that present a decolonial archive and vision for life in Hawai’i. It will anchor a book series with Duke University Press, with volumes on Palestine, Guåhan/Guam, Okinawa, Singapore, Korea, the San Francisco Bay Area, Puerto Rico, and other sites in development led by dynamic editorial collectives. Most recently, I’ve been a co-editor of Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader, an interdisciplinary collection about the K-Pop group BTS with Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho, Rani Neutill, Mimi Thi Nguyen, and Yutian Wong (Duke 2024). An ongoing collaboration with Hōkūlani K. Aikau and Foley Pfalzgraf is next, which is a Teaching Detours open access guide focused on the two Oceania volumes with the Center for Pacific Studies monograph series.  

I’m working on a number of interrelated projects at this moment having to do with the gendered labor of hospitality and circuits of militarized labor as well as geographies of militarization in California and Hawai‘i. 

Teaching Detours workshop with Detours Hawai‘i and Detours Guåhan crews
Teaching Detours workshop with Detours Hawai‘i and Detours Guåhan crews