Professor
Colonel Donald W. Wiethuechter USA Ret. Endowed Faculty Fellow in Military History
Contact Information
SMI 116A
Office Hours
Please contact to set up an appointment.
Biography
Ph.D. Cornell University, 1984
M.A. Cornell University, 1982
BA, Ateneo de Manila University, 1977
Curriculum Vitae
(353.7 KB)
Trained in Southeast Asian history, European intellectual history and anthropology, my research interests include areas such as language and power, the politics of translation and literature, Comparative Colonialisms and nationalism, the social history of media and mediation, critical theory and anthropology, empire, race and gender. Much of my writing has been on the colonial and post-colonial Philippines and the United States.
Awards
2017. Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas para sa Kritisimo sa Ingles (Balagtas Award for Criticism in English), UMPIL (Union of Writers in the Philippines).
2017. Visiting Professor, Nida School of Translation Studies, Misano Adriatico, Italy.
2014. Visiting Professor, De La Salle University and Ateneo de Manila University, Manila, Philippines.
2013. Visiting Professor, University of the Philippines.
2013. Visiting Faculty, Nida School of Translation Studies, Misano Adriatico, Italy.
2011. Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Haverford College.
2011. Distinguished Professor, Nida School of Translation Studies, Misano Adriatico, Italy.
2008. Solomon Katz Distinguished Lecturer, University of Washington.
2007. Grant Goodman Prize, Philippine Studies Group, Association for Asian Studies (This is a lifetime achievement award in Philippine Studies).
2006. Invited to be a Resident Fellow, Center for the Study of Advanced Behavioral Sciences, Stanford.
2006. Mini-grant, Transnational Institute, Jackson School, Univ. of Washington.
2004-05. Fellowship, Simpson Humanities Center, Univ. of Washington.
2003. Fellowship, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto Univ., Japan (declined).
2000-01. Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
2000. Winner, National Book Award for History, Manila Critics’ Circle, Philippines (for "White Love and Other Events in Filipino History").
1998. The Andrews Visiting Chair in Asian Studies, University of Hawai'i at Manoa.
1998. Committee on Research Grant, Academic Senate, UCSD.
1997. Residential Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, Bellagio, Italy.
1997. Visiting Research Fellowship, Humanities Research Institute, Univ. of California, Irvine.
1996. Committee on Research Grant, Academic Senate, UCSD.
1996. Visiting Fellow, International Institute, University of Michigan.
1996-97. Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton (declined).
1995. Luce Foundation. Southeast Asia Council Small grants.
1994. Visiting Fellow. Program for Cultural Studies, East-West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii.
1994. Committee on Research Grant, Academic Senate, UCSD.
1992-93. Fellow, Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine.
1992. Advanced Research Grant. Social Science Research Council.
1989-90. Committee on Research Grant, Academic Senate, UCSD.
1989. National Book Award for History, Manila Critics' Circle, Manila, Philippines (for "Contracting Colonialism").
1988. Grantee, USIA Bureau of Cultural and Educational Affairs Exchange Program.
1987-88. Research and Training Award, University of Hawaii Research Council.
1986-87. Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford University.
1984. Lauriston Sharp Prize for Outstanding Dissertation, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University.
Research
Selected Research
- The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte, Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2022. Print.
- “Duterte’s Phallus: On the Aesthetics of Vulgarity,” 2020-21, talk delivered at: Southeast Asian Studies Center, UC Berkeley; at Yale Univ.; at New York University. https://yale.app.box.com/s/lf047607rinyw8k9pyvet86n12exvda6?fbclid=IwAR0PL6_DRFG5KbXN9cOrjto6fjOSXwZKVyijQvtTu5HGYTN9JMAEw214Qas
- “Photographic Power: Tales from the United States and the Philippines,” History Lecture Series, Univ. of Washington, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0kLJX8Oax4
- “Telling Times: Nick Joaquin, Storyteller,” positions: Asia Critique, v. 29, no.1, 121-141. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8722810
- “Photography and the Biopolitics of Fear: Witnessing the Philippine Drug War,” positions: Asia Critique, November, v. 28, no. 4, 905-933. https://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-abstract/28/4/905/167026/Photography-and-the-Biopolitics-of-FearWitnessing?redirectedFrom=fulltext Download PDF
- Rafael, Vicente L., “Linguistic Currencies: The Translative Power of English in the United States and Southeast Asia,” in The Translator, 25:2, 2019, 142-158, https://www.academia.edu/40893944/Vicente_L._Rafael_Linguistic_currencies_the_translative_power_of_English_in_Southeast_Asia_and_the_United_States Download PDF
- Rafael, Vicente L., "The Sovereign Trickster," The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 78, No. 1 (February) 2019: 141-166. https://www.academia.edu/38538056/Vicente_L._Rafael_The_Sovereign_Trickster Download PDF
- Rafael, Vicente L., “Colonial Contractions: The Modern Philippines, 1565-1946,” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, edited by David Ludden, New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2018, http://asianhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-268 Download PDF
- Joaquin, Nick. The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic. New York: Penguin Classics, 2017. (Introduction by Vicente L. Rafael.)
- Rafael, Vicente L. Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Print.
- Rafael, Vicente L., “Mid-education, Translation and the Barkada of Languages: Reading Renato Constantino with Nick Joaquin,” Kritika Kultura (Ateneo de Manila Univ.), 1-29, http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net Download PDF
- Rafael, Vicente L. The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Print.
- Rafael, Vicente, Rafael, The Undead: Notes on Photography in the Philippines, 1898-1920s (From White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, 2000). https://www.academia.edu/40893984/Vicente_L._Rafael_The_Undead_Notes_on_Photography_in_the_Philippines_1898-1920s Download PDF
- Rafael, Vicente L. White Love and Other Events in Filipino History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Print.
- Rafael, Vicente L. Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines and Colonial Vietnam. Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999. Print.
- Rafael, Vicente L. Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. Print.
- Rafael, Vicente L. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule. Hardbound edition, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Paperback edition, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
Research Advised
- Lin Hongxuan. "Ummah Yet Proletariat: Islam and Marxism in the Netherlands East Indies and Indonesia, 1915 - 1959." PhD diss., University of Washington.
- Lai, Symbol. Decolonizing Okinawa: Social Science, Agriculture, and US Militarism, 1945-1972. Diss. University of Washington, 2017. Chairs: Tani Barlow and Vince Rafael.
- Lumba, Allan. Monetary Authorities: Market Knowledge and Imperial Government in the Colonial Philippines, 1892 - 1942. Diss. University of Washington, 2013. Chair: Vicente Rafael.
- Inherited Destinies, phantom limbs: Empire, settler colonialism, and trauma in the Philippines and Peru, 1920-1928. Seattle. In progress.
- Arthit Jiamrattanyoo. "Conquest of Amity: Affective Politics and Cultures of Friendship in the Spanish Colonization of the Philippines, 1521-1762." Dissertation, Universty of Washington, ongoing.
Courses Taught
Winter 2026
Autumn 2025
Summer 2025
Spring 2025
Winter 2025
Autumn 2024
Summer 2024
Spring 2024
Winter 2024
Autumn 2023
Summer 2023
Spring 2023
Winter 2023
Autumn 2022
Summer 2022
Spring 2022
Winter 2022
Autumn 2021
Summer 2021
Spring 2021
Winter 2021
Autumn 2020
Summer 2020
Spring 2020
Winter 2020
Autumn 2019
Summer 2019
Spring 2019
Winter 2019
Autumn 2018
Summer 2018
Spring 2018
Winter 2018
Graduate Study Areas
Division: Asia--Pre-History to the Present
This field is constructed with an emphasis on island Southeast Asia and the Philippines from 1521 to the present.
Division: United States History
Asian American socio-cultural histories, with an emphasis on Filipino Americans and Filipino overseas workers
Division: Comparative History (Historiography, Comparative Ethnicity & Nationalism, and Comparative Colonialisms)
A field in Comparative Historiography will include Nationalist and postcolonial conceptions of history, deconstruction, critical theory especially as these relate to the politics of translation, religion, and media technologies. A field in Comparative Colonialisms will carry a focus on United States and Spanish imperialism in Asia and the Pacific. The field in Comparative Nationalism and Ethnicity focuses on the historical and technological conditions for the rise of nationhood, as well as the role of mass media, translation and the languages of power in nationalist discourses.