Elmo Gonzaga is an interdisciplinary scholar of Southeast Asian film, media, and urban cultures.

His first single-authored book, Globalization and Becoming-nation: Subjectivity, Nationhood, and Narrative in the Period of Global Capitalism (University of the Philippines Press, 2010), analyzes Anglophone postcolonial novels that contrast Martial Law authoritarian sovereignty with post-EDSA Revolution neoliberal capitalism.

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 through popular representations of lost 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, he is co-editor of Inter-Asia Intermediality: Creative Labor, Co-Production, and Outsourcing (Amsterdam University Press / Routledge, 2027). Departing from scholarship about the dominant culture industries of Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and India, the edited 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 work has been published in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, International Journal for the Sociology of Language, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, South East Asia Research, and the Journal of Asian Studies. Recent refereed journal articles examine: 1) the production, exhibition, and consumption of poverty porn in arthouse festival films; 2) militarized supply chains of financialization, extraction, and logistics in speculative spy, superhero, and sci-fi network narratives; and 3) the anti-colonial imagination of region in omnibus cinema and database art.

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 Urban Mediations with Klaudia Lee and Joanna Mansbridge (under contract with Manchester University Press).

Gonzaga is the recipient of two competitive Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC) General Research Fund (GRF) grants on Southeast Asian film, literary, and media theories and cultures. 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 Southeast Asia’s diverse cultures. He is co-convenor of the Transnational Urban Narratives Network. He is also a member of the Modern Language Association’s Delegate Assembly and the Executive Committee of its Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian Diasporic Forum.