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, post-colonial 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, fashion, militarism and tourism.

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 a chapter on tourism and militarism in Bataan and Corregidor for publication in Gender and Militarism Across the Asia-Pacific (edited by Setsu Shigematsu and Keith Lujan Camacho), as well as writing chapters on colonial anthropology’s legacies for tourism in Commodity Racism: Representation, Racialization and Resistance (edited by C. Richard King) and Performing Ethnicity (edited by Priscelina Patajo-Legasto, Joi Barrios and Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns).

Other ongoing projects include a collaboration with Mimi Nguyen on the politics of transnational queer scholarship and an article on the feminist politics of the Hawaiian quilt as a symbol of Hawaiian indigeneity and product of Asian labor.

Her published work can be found in several collections, including AsianAmerica.Net (Routledge, 2004), and Alien Encounters: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Duke UP, 2007).

When not at work on her book, she is can be found bike-commuting her 2 year old daughter to preschool, the pool, and the playground. She used to have a social life.