My family moved to Manila when I was six years old and I have now spent over half my life in the Philippines. My childhood in the midst of shantytowns, and several years as an adult spent in rural Central Luzon, for me imbue the Philippines with a powerful sense of home. Tagalog is a language in which I think and dream; I am as fluent in it as I am in English.

I began my university education at UC Berkeley somewhat late in life, at the age of twenty-seven, my worldview and commitments already substantively shaped by life. I worked in a garage in rural Tennessee, where I lived for five years in a cabin in the woods. I served as minister of a provincial church in a rice farming community in the Philippines. I taught ethnic studies at a public high school in Oakland, California.

My life and scholarship are dedicated to the cause of the oppressed, both to recovering their historically silenced voices and to seeing that the lessons of the past serve in the shaping of a better future.

I write poetry, enjoy public speaking, try to go backpacking for a week in the wilderness every year, and love to play chess.

I currently live in Hong Kong, where I am Assistant Profesor of History at Hong Kong Baptist University. I am father to three wonderful children.

I am dedicated to expanding the use of open source software in the humanities. In my own work I use Zotero to archive my digital references, JabRef to manage citations, Obsidian for notetaking, Vim for editing, git for version control, and markdown and L^aT_eX for document production.

This website was built with Jekyll and is written in markdown. The design draws heavily on the ideas of Edward Tufte.

I conduct all of my work on an Arch distro GNU/Linux machine using an i3 windows manager.