Vernadette Gonzales

Vernadette Gonzales is a professor of American studies and director of the honors program at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her areas of research 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 Asia and the Pacific. Her first book, Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines (Duke University Press, 2013) examines the modern military and touristic ideologies, cultures, and technologies of mobility and surveillance in the Philippines and Hawai‘i. Her second book, Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper (Duke University Press, 2021) is a genealogy of imperial geopolitics and desire through the life story of a mixed-race vaudeville and film actor and sometime-mistress of General Douglas MacArthur. She is coeditor of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai‘i (Duke University Press, 2019), and a decolonial guide series for the press.