Born, raised, and educated in Manila, Elmo Gonzaga is a former Permanent Resident of Singapore, where he lived and taught for 7 years.

His second monograph, Monsoon Marketplace (Fordham University Press, 2023), comparatively traces the vernacular print, film, and visual cultures of capitalist modernity, mass consumption, and media spectatorship in Manila and Singapore by analyzing representations of popular night markets, amusement parks, main streets and high streets, department stores, shopping malls, and movie theaters during important historical moments of colonial occupation in the 1930s, national development in the 1960s, and neoliberal globalization in the 2000s.

With Brian Bernards (University of Southern California), he is the co-editor of the edited collection Inter-Asia Intermediality: Creative Labor, Co-Production, and Outsourcing (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming).  Departing from scholarship about the dominant culture industries of Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and India, the volume looks at more peripheral sites of transmedia production and circulation in Southeast Asia, which is typically assumed to be their passive recipient. Exploring how cinema draws on vernacular cultural and aesthetic forms such as radio, music, poetry, dance, online video, and theater, its chapters uncover the creative consumption and labor of diverse animators, translators, vloggers, and fans.

His recent refereed publications include: a book chapter about Cold War tropes of suspicion and persecution in iconic movie star Fernando Poe Jr.’s early Western and war movies; and a journal article about militarized supply chains of financialization, extraction, and logistics in speculative spy, superhero, and sci-fi network narratives.

He is currently completing two book manuscripts about genre and setting in Southeast Asian film and media cultures. He is also the co-editor of two anthologies: Urban Mediations with Klaudia Lee and Joanna Mansbridge; and Living in Liminality with Xuenan Cao and Pang Laikwan.

He is the project leader for Doing Theory in Southeast Asia, a HK Research Grants Council GRF-funded open-access database of critical and creative texts that could be used to think and theorize about Southeast Asia’s diverse cultures.

He has co-convened multiple international conferences at CUHK on emergent fields such as Southeast Asian theory, inter-Asian intermediality, global urban humanities, and critical archipelagic studies.

As its Director, the MA in Intercultural Studies program has initiated a Public Theory Lab and Diversity & Inclusion Scholarship, which aim to cultivate networks of students, teachers, researchers, and practitioners in Hong Kong, China, ASEAN, and BRICS.

He is a member of the Advisory Board for Verge: Studies in Global Asias and the Executive Committee for the Modern Language Association’s Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian Diasporic Forum.