The Filipinx and Philippine Studies (FPS) Working Group hosts a regular lineup of reading group meetings and guest speakers during the academic year. All meetings are open to students, faculty, and researchers across all disciplines and institutions, and last no longer than 90 minutes.
2025-2026 Events
- September 9, 2025
FPS hosted a book launch with Kathleen “Kat” Cruz Gutierrez (Ph.D., Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley), Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian History and the History of Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for her book Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines.
- October 10, 2025
FPS hosted a workshop with Joshua Acosta (PhD Candidate, Ethnic Studies) on his project, Colonial Order and Mental Disorder. The workshop examined how ideas about “mental illness” circulated in the Philippines by tracing how its management became part of colonial development, public health politics, and both institutional and popular discourses.
- December 5, 2026
FPS hosted Diana J. S. Martinez, Assistant Professor of Architecture in the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley, for a workshop on her book Concrete Colonialism: Architecture, Urbanism, and the U.S. Imperial Project in the Philippines
- January 20, 2026
FPS co-hosted Lisandro Claudio’s book launch The Profligate Colonial: How the United States Exported Austerity to the Philippines.
- January 24, 2026,
FPS members watched Lav Diaz’s Magellan at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco, where Diaz appeared in person for a post-screening Q&A. The screening offered members an opportunity to discuss Diaz’s retelling of the Magellan expedition and its treatment of conquest, conversion, and colonial violence in the Philippines.
- February 10, 2026
FPS hosted a workshop with Veronica Sison (Ph.D. student, South and Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley) on her paper project, Reconceptualizing Ordinary People’s Experiences in the Cold War Philippines, 1945–1954.
- March 6 2026
FPS hosted a workshop with Joshua Acosta (Ph.D. Candidate, Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley) on his dissertation chapter, Mad Moros “Running Amok” in the Colonial Encounter.
- April 3, 2026
FPS hosted Prof. Christina Lee (Princeton University) for a graduate student workshop. The seminar focused on her book Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines under Early Spanish Rule (Oxford University Press, 2021), as well as her digital repatriation project, Reclaiming the Lost Archive of the Convento de San Agustín, co-led with Cristina Martínez-Juan (SOAS, University of London).
- April 17, 2026
FPS screened Mike de Leon’s Kisapmata as part of its film programming. It is one of the landmark works of Philippine psychological horror and political cinema. First released in 1981, the film was inspired by Nick Joaquin’s true-crime reportage, The House on Zapote Street, and has often been read as a critique of patriarchy, domestic terror, and authoritarian power during the Marcos period.
- April 17, 2026
FPS hosted Johaina Crisostomo (Johns Hopkins University) for a workshop on her upcoming book, Imperfect Sacrifice: The Crisis of Political Imagination in Transimperial Philippines, 1896–1935.
- April 22, 2026
FPS hosted the annual Brother Andrew Gonzalez Lecture, featuring Dr. Nina Capistrano-Baker. Her lecture, titled “Cracks in the Pith Paper: Reframing Philippine Art History,” formed part of FPS’s broader programming in Philippine and Filipinx Studies and brought together faculty, students, and community members for a public conversation on Philippine art history, scholarship, intellectual exchange [and the politics of Philippine Studies funding at UC Berkeley].