About us
The SOAS Annual Philippine Studies Conference
Now on its sixth year, the Annual Philippine Studies Conference series is organized by Philippine Studies at SOAS.
Philippine Studies at SOAS is a forum for Philippine–related teaching, research and cultural production in the UK and Europe. Established in part by a Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs grant to the Centre for South East Asian Studies in 2017, the PSS Committee develops and coordinates academic research and teaching on the Philippines and functions as an organising centre for conferences, public lectures, film screenings and language classes. It is also an aggregating hub for Philippine-related information on current academic and cultural events, student resources for grants and scholarships, and a networking database for Filipinistas in the UK and Europe.
As a global hub for advancing Philippine studies and culture in the United Kingdom and Europe, Philippine Studies at SOAS is an expanding public resource for creating relationships with partner institutions in the Philippines, the rest of South East Asia and beyond.
People
Maria Cristina Martinez-Juan
Chairperson, chief editor and curator of KAAGI | Tracing VIsayan Identities in Cultural Texts (Brunei Gallery June-September 2021)
Cristina Martinez-Juan has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of the Philippines, Diliman and an MA in Museums, Heritage and Material Culture Studies from SOAS. As an Associate Professor at the Humanities Department of the University of the Philippines, Cebu, she taught at U.P. before she moved to New York in 1996 then to London in 2013. In 2017, she spearheaded the creation of Philippine Studies at SOAS (PSS) under the Centre of South East Asian Studies.
Nixi Cura
Conference Co-Chair and Editor
Nixi Cura read East Asian Studies (China) at Yale University, then undertook postgraduate research on Chinese painting, Buddhist art, and Romanesque architecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. In the UK, Cura was Director of the Arts of China MLitt and PhD programmes at Christie’s Education London/University of Glasgow (2007-2017). She remains an Honorary Research Fellow at Glasgow and also held the role of Senior Fellow in the Cultural Leadership programme at the Royal Academy of Arts. At SOAS she has served as Senior Teaching Fellow, and from 2020 as Doctoral Researcher. Cura’s publications and research interests range from Qing painting and material culture, collecting and antiquarian practices during the Qing, Republican, and Manchukuo periods, to modern and contemporary visual culture in Asia.
William Gervase Clarence-Smith
Conference Co-Chair and Advisor
William Gervase Clarence-Smith is Professor Emeritus of the Economic History of Asia and Africa at SOAS, University of London. William Gervase Clarence-Smith is Emeritus Professor of History at SOAS University
of London. He has published much on diasporas, including, for the Philippines, Spaniards, Middle Easterners, and South Asians. He has recently brought out a chapter on manufacturing in the Philippines in the nineteenth century, and has been researching on the Rothschilds and Philippine tobacco in the same period. He has a further interest in the history of domestic animals in the archipelago.
