Elmo Gonzaga completed his PhD in the University of California, Berkeley's Rhetoric Department under the supervision of Trinh T. Minh-ha. A native of Metro Manila, he taught for several years in Singapore.

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 (Routledge, forthcoming).  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.

Gonzaga's 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.

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 two anthologies: Urban Mediations with Klaudia Lee and Joanna Mansbridge; and Living in Liminality with Xuenan Cao and Pang Laikwan.

Gonzaga 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 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.

He is a member of the Modern Language Association’s Delegate Assembly and the Executive Committee of its Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian Diasporic Forum.