Denise Cruz

Denise Cruz is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and a scholar of gender and sexuality in national and transnational cultures. The subjects she studies are varied: from the connections between the rise of English literature and the women’s suffrage movement in the Philippines; to the vibrant high fashion world of contemporary Manila; to the artistic strategies modernist authors used to imagine a transpacific world during the early twentieth century. Her research documents, historicizes, and explores national, regional, and global dynamics in North America, the Philippines, and Asia, and their effects on how we think about gender and sexuality. The author of Transpacific Femininities: the Making of the Modern Filipina (Duke UP, 2012) , she has also published essays in American Quarterly, PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, American Literary History, the Journal of Asian American Studies and in edited collections on Asian American culture, Philippine studies, and gender studies. She is currently working on two book projects: a study of fashion in Manila and its connections to the national and global (funded by a five-year Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council), and an analysis of regions and regionalisms in Asian America. You can find out more about these projects at www.denise-cruz.com.