Vernadette Gonzalez earned her BA in English Literature with certificates in African American Studies and Theater and Dance from Princeton University in 1996. She finished her PhD in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. Her areas of specialization include studies of tourism and militarism, transnational cultural studies, feminist theory, postcolonial studies, Asian American cultural and literary studies, and globalization studies with a focus on the Asia/Pacific.

She has previously taught in the Ethnic Studies Department and the Women’s Studies Department at UC Berkeley and the Global Studies Department at St. Lawrence University. She will be teaching AMST 150 “America and the World” regularly for the American Studies Department, as well as courses on sexuality, gender, militarism and tourism and empire. She is currently serving as the Undergraduate Chair for the department.

Professor Gonzalez’s current projects include a book manuscript, which seeks to interrogate the links between modern military and touristic ideologies, cultures, and technologies of mobility and surveillance in the Philippines and Hawai‘i. It hopes to illustrate how the roots and routes of the US military are foundational to tourist itineraries, as well as how modern tourism is central to the mission of unilateral American militarism. This project interrogates the seeming contradictions between the promise of modernity, mobility, capital and “development” held out by tourism and militarism, and the necessary economic and social asymmetries that enable touristic and militaristic dependence in the postcolonial geographies of the Asia/Pacific. She is also currently revising an article on the transnational feminist politics of the Hawaiian quilt for a collection on Asian/Latin American/Pacific encounters, and articles on ethnic tourism in Sagada, Philippines and the Polynesian Cultural Center in Oahu for journals.

Her published work can be found in several collections, including AsianAmerica.Net (Routledge, 2004), Alien Encounters: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Duke UP, 2007) and Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (Summer 2007). A chapter on tourism and militarism in Bataan and Corregidor is slated for publication in De/militarizing Currents: Gender, Race and Colonialism Across Asia and the Pacific (edited by Setsu Shigematsu and Keith Lujan Camacho, University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming Fall 2009).

Her other projects include coordinating “And Justice for All,” a collaborative art exhibit about political killings in the Philippines and other US “states of terror.” (November 2008, thirtyninehotel gallery, Honolulu, HI).