Dr. Allan E. S. Lumba, History

Biography

Allan E. S. Lumba is a historian of hard infrastructures, financial ecology, and technopolitics in Asia and the Pacific. He engages questions of racial capitalism, imperialism, decolonization, and degrowth. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of History at the University of Washington. His book, Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines, charts the historical intersections and tensions between race, knowledge, sovereignty, and the capitalist market in the United States and the Philippines.

He is currently at work on an infrastructural history of sinking cities around Asia and the Pacific, titled “Subsidence: Surfacing Life in a Sinking City." This project has received funding from the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University (2024) and the SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2024-2026).

He has published articles in the journals, Diplomatic History, Radical History Review, Critical Ethnic Studies, and the Journal for the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, as well as chapters in editorial collections, such as A Cultural History of Money and Credit: A Global Perspectives, The Gilded Age and Progressive Era: Making of Modern America, Histories of Racial Capitalism, and For Anti-Fascist Futures.

Previously, he served as Global American Studies postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Charles Warren Center (2013 - 2015), Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan (2015 - 2018), and assistant professor at Virginia Tech. He is the past recipient of numerous research support including the Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Grant, Foreign Language Areas Studies Fellowships, and multiple university grants and fellowships from the University of Washington and Virginia Tech. He has also served as resident fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago and University of Michigan's Bentley Library.

Teaching

I teach classes on racial capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, decolonization and other social movements. My classes mainly focus on Philippine, Southeast Asian, Pacific, North American, Asian American, and global history. 

Publications

Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022).

open access: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/58913

"To Rest Beside Another: Filipino Migrant Worldmaking and the California Labor Camps, 1930s - 1970s," Radical History Review 154 (January 2026): 57 - 81.

"New Directions in Political History," The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 22.1 (January 2023): 63 - 95.

"Left Alone With the Colony," For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis. Common Notions, 2022. or Critical Ethnic Studies

“Transpacific Migration, Racial Surplus, and Colonial Settlement,” Histories of Racial Capitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2022)

“Empire, Expansion, and its Consequences,” Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: The Making of Modern America (Wiley Blackwell, 2017).