Overview
My research examines the relationship of visual form, material culture, and literary production in Maritime Southeast Asia, with a focus on Islamic art and the networks of Muslim port cities. Drawing on vernacular systems of visuality and belief, I explore how ornament and devotion converged in the material cultures of global Islam. I examine how scale, format, and media specificity shape meaning and representation by integrating close readings of texts and images with research into the historical readers and users of talismanic and nacreous objects—such as pearls, hilts, scrolls, and devotional diagrams—that circulated across the Indian Ocean and the Sulu Sea, and that reappear, often reframed, in early modern European paintings. Drawing on an archipelagic methodology, I approach the sea as a generative matrix through which knowledge and image-worlds circulated and transformed. My research traces the cultural-critical formation of Southeast Asian artists, examining how religious and colonial encounters mediated their artistic subjectivity. Engaging the historiography of Southeast Asian and Islamic art, I foreground syncretic expressions and local epistemologies, attending to how they have both supported and unsettled imperial frameworks.
Teaching and Languages
Before beginning my doctoral studies at Cornell, I taught Art History at Ateneo de Manila University and served as a Teaching Assistant at Columbia University. From 2023 to 2024, I co-organized the Gatty Lecture Series with colleagues at Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program. In Summer 2025, I will be a Drewes Fellow at the Scaliger Instituut, Universiteit Leiden, where I will conduct research on Islamic texts and manuscript traditions. I am fluent in Tagalog and Cebuano, with advanced proficiency in Bahasa Indonesia. I also have reading proficiency in Spanish, German, and Jawi. I was awarded the Milton Barnett Scholarship for Malaysian Studies (2023) and the Rare and Distinctive Languages Fellowship (2024) by Cornell’s Einaudi Center.
Publications
“Irineo Miranda’s Ethnographic Portraits of Nina Rasul and the Philippine Bangsamoro.” Philippine Studies 73, no. 1 (2025), 3-43. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960260
“The Intramuros of Anak Dalita, the Looban of Manila Noir.” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 36, no. 3 (2021): 387–416. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/845157.
“The Sentimental Masks of Marcos and Robredo.” Contemporary Southeast Asia: A Journal of International and Strategic Affairs 44, no. 3 (2022): 411–420. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/879196.
“Pushing against the Roof of the World: Ruangrupa’s Prospects for Documenta 15.” Third Text, October 26, 2020. https://thirdtext.org/cristobal-ruangrupa.
Other Writings
Review of Enigmatic Objects: Notes towards a History of the Museum in the Philippines, by Resil Mojares. Southeast Asian Studies 14, no. 1 (April 25, 2025). doi: 10.20495/seas.14.1_197
“Philippine Items at the Cornell Anthropology Collections.” Mapping Philippine Material Culture, 2024. https://philippinestudies.uk/mapping/collections/show/466.
“These Fragments I Have Shored against My Ruin: The Counter-Archive of Teodulo Protomartir.” Broadcast: Pioneer Works, August 24, 2021. https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/fragments-shored-against-ruins-geronimo-cristobal
“Perpetual Motion: Tragedy and Displacement in the Work of Hokusai, Bernardo, and Albers.” Broadcast: Pioneer Works, June 25, 2021. https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/perpetual-motion-geronimo-cristobal