Adrian De Leon

Filipino Studies, Asian American History, Indigenous Asias, Settler Colonialism, Visual Culture, Racial Capitalism, Creative Writing

Adrian De Leon is an award-winning public historian and writer at the University of Southern California, where he is an Assistant Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity. At USC, he serves on the steering committee of the Center for Transpacific Studies, and holds affiliations in several other initiatives across campus. Through a multi-sited archival and ethnographic analysis of the Philippines and the Filipino diaspora, De Leon studies the relationship between indigeneity, settler colonialism, and resource extraction.

Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America, his first academic book, is forthcoming in Fall 2023 with the University of North Carolina Press. Using archival research in the Philippines, Hawai‘i, North America, and Spain, Bundok follows the co-constitution of Philippine indigeneity and Filipino migrant labor through the racial archives of 19th-century plantation capitalism in Luzon’s northern hinterlands.

He is currently working on two academic books. Balikbayan: The Invention of the Filipino Homeland (under contract with the University of Washington Press) examines the continuation of American colonial conquest into the formation of non-elite and non-metropolitan Filipinos across the Pacific, and how they imagined becoming subjects of an independent nation yet-to-come. A chapter of Balikbayan, a visual biography of the photographer and labor contractor Frank Mancao, was published in the Journal of American Ethnic History, and received the 2023 Carlton C. Qualey Memorial Article Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.

Another book, After Homeland: A History of Interrupted Relations, theorizes contemporary return migrations through the author’s personal history. It brings contemporary articulations of the “homeland” under scrutiny, between the Philippines and other global contexts, and shows how nation-states manufacture and harness the nostalgia of diasporas to fortify their economies, and legitimize their claims to stolen land.

Adrian De Leon’s first poetry collection, Rouge, was published by Mawenzi House in 2018. With fellow Scarborough-based writers Téa Mutonji (Shut Up, You’re Pretty, April 2019) and Natasha Ramoutar (Bittersweet, 2020), he is a co-editor of FEEL WAYS (2021), a pioneering anthology of emerging Scarborough writers. His second collection, barangay: an offshore poem (November 2021), was named among 2021’s best Canadian poetry books by the CBC. Currently, he is finishing his first novel, Fellow.

With Emmy award-winning journalist Dolly Li, Adrian De Leon is the co-creator and co-host of the PBS miniseries, A People’s History of Asian America (2021), which was a finalist for Best History Short Format at the World Congress of Science and Factual Producers. Joining co-hosts Danielle Bainbridge (Northwestern University) and Dolly Li, his new show, Historian’s Take, will be streaming on PBS Origins.

De Leon’s research and commentary have appeared in venues such as: Los Angeles Times, National Geographic, The Conversation, VICE, ABC Nightline, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian. In 2022, he received the Engaged Scholar Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.

With Dorinne Kondo (American Studies & Ethnicity and Anthropology) and Jackie Wang (American Studies & Ethnicity), De Leon is a co-founder and co-convenor of the transdisciplinary research cluster, Creativity, Theory, Politics. 

• Ph.D. History, University of Toronto, 5/2019
• B.A. English, University of Toronto Scarborough, 6/2014