Lisandro Claudio

Lisandro Claudio is an intellectual and cultural historian of the Philippines, with a broad interest in the history of global liberal thought. His book Liberalism and the Postcolony: Thinking the State in Twentieth-Century Philippines (NUS, Kyoto, and Ateneo de Manila Press) received the 2019 George McT. Kahin Prize from the Association of Asian Studies and the 2019 European Association for Southeast Asian Studies Humanities Book Prize. He is also the author of a short book Jose Rizal: Liberalism and the Paradox of Coloniality (Palgrave), which examines how turn-of-the-century liberalism informed the birth of Filipino literature and nationalism.

His next book project, tentatively titled Empire of Austerity: The American Progressive Era and the Formation of Philippine Economic Thought, 1902-1986, seeks to trace the historical and cultural roots of economic conservatism in the Philippines, from the implementation of the gold-exchange standard during the American Progressive Era to the collapse of developmentalism under the Marcos dictatorship. Apart from being a revisionist history of the Philippine economics and the American Progressive Era, it is an attempt to foreground textual methods in economic history through an examination of the relationship between discourses of austerity and colonialism.

Prior to his appointment at Berkeley, Claudio taught at Ateneo de Manila University and De La Salle University and was a post-doctoral fellow at Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies.