Elmo GONZAGA is Director of the MA in Intercultural Studies Programme. Born, raised, and educated in Manila, he is a former Permanent Resident of Singapore, where he lived and taught for 7 years.

Monsoon Marketplace (Fordham University Press, 2023), his second monograph, traces the entangled media cultures of capitalism, modernity, consumption, and spectatorship in Manila and Singapore through representations of popular commercial and leisure spaces such as street bazaars, amusement parks, movie theaters, and shopping malls during colonial occupation in the 1930s, national development in the 1960s, and neoliberal globalization in the 2000s. An extract was published in the Journal of Asian Studies.

Forming part of an upcoming monograph about the aesthetics of inequality, an earlier article in Cinema Journal, “The Cinematographic Unconscious of Slum Voyeurism”, examines poverty porn created by Global South filmmakers and artists for international film funds and festivals. A related piece in Cultural Studies, “Zombie Capitalism and Coronavirus Time”, explores how zombie movies and memes frame the political and temporal cultures of state capitalism, social order, and market risk during the covid-19 pandemic.

His work on ‘Decolonizing and Doing Theory in Southeast Asia’ has been supported by three grants, notably the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC)’s General Research Fund (GRF). Its key output is an online, open-access database, which annotates significant critical, scholarly, and creative texts. Building on an invited entry for the Asia Theories Network's Critical Asia Archives about the keyword "Archipelago", its findings are being developed into a new book manuscript.

He is the co-convenor, together with Prof. Klaudia Lee of City University of Hong Kong, of the Transnational Urban Narratives Network, a global platform for interdisciplinary work in the Urban Humanities. Funded by CUHK’s Research Institute for the Humanities, this cross-institutional initiative comprises a reading group, a writing workshop, and an edited volume.

In collaboration with Prof. Brian Bernards of University of Southern California, he has co-organized conferences and panels on ‘Inter-Asia Intermediality,’ which have resulted in a forthcoming anthology.

He is a Member of the Advisory Board of Verge: Studies in Global Asias.