Kristine Marie Reynaldo

I teach literature and composition at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman, where I wrote a thesis on the feminist revisionist mythology of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle, and graduated with a BA in Literature (magna cum laude) in the summer of 2010. Before teaching in UP, I worked for some years as a copy, developmental, and acquisitions editor for academic and trade publishing houses while taking masters courses in political philosophy.

I completed my doctorate in Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong in 2021 with a dissertation titled “Tracing the Roots of Disjunction: Dutertismo and the Discourse of Liberal Democracy in the Philippines.” Examining the political dimension of the cultural and the cultural forms of the political, my research concerns the problem of contemporary “populist” political violence and its contexts of emergence. In particular, my dissertation traces the contradictions between normative liberal discourse and enduring structural injustice as these manifest in cultural texts such as literature, films, photojournalism, music, political advertisements, protest materials, online discourse, and ethnographic field work. More generally, my dissertation explores the affects, problematics, and contestations of nationalism, democracy, and development as key terms of inter-Asian postcolonial modernity.