Adrian De Leon is an Assistant Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where he serves on the steering committee of the Center for Transpacific Studies. He earned his PhD in History at the University of Toronto in 2019, where he was a SSHRC Bombardier Scholar, a Fulbright Scholar, and a Junior Fellow and Don of Hall at Massey College.

Through multi-sited ethnography and archival analysis of Filipino communities, Adrian investigates the production of social difference under capitalist regimes of resource extraction and labor mobilization. To this end, he is at work on two monographs. The first shows how the 19th century plantation economy in the island of Luzon produced the racial images that coalesce as “Filipino” identity. A second book traces the gender politics of Filipino migrant workers in the American West. His peer-reviewed articles appear in Gastronomica (2016), Food, Culture & Society (2017), Radical History Review (2018), and Amerasia (2019).

Adrian is also poet, fiction writer, and editor with several book projects: Rouge (2018); FEEL WAYS: An Anthology of Scarborough Writing (co-editor, 2020); and barangay (forthcoming 2021). His creative writing appears in The Puritan (2019), Joyland Magazine (2020), and Canadian Literature (2020).