About the site

Reading Philippine Studies is an independent online platform for reading, thinking, and sharing work on the Philippines through history and related fields. It features academic research alongside essays, reviews, and projects written for readers in universities and elsewhere. The site aims to make scholarship more accessible, more open, and more connected to the many ways people encounter the Philippines and its histories.

To read the Philippines is not only to read books or archives, though those matter deeply. It is also to read photographs and streets, newspapers and silences, memories passed down and stories half-told. It is to notice how the past does not stay in the past, but folds itself into the present — sometimes quietly, sometimes in ways that are harder to ignore.

This site began as the online home of the CUHK Philippine Studies Interdisciplinary Reading Group, a student-led initiative supported by the CUHK Research Institute for the Humanities. At the time, it was a place to gather: around texts, certainly, but also around questions. People came together to read, discuss, and linger over ideas that did not always resolve neatly.

Over time, the site has grown beyond that beginning.

It now brings together reading lists, book reviews, research notes, public history projects, digital humanities work, event reflections, and other materials. The forms vary, but the impulse remains similar: to make space for careful attention. While history continues to anchor the site, the conversations move outward into culture, memory, migration, urban life, literature, archives, and public scholarship.

What this site hopes to do

If there is an aim, it is a modest one.

This site hopes to make Philippine Studies a little more open: easier to approach, easier to return to, and easier to share. So much work already exists, but it is often dispersed across classrooms, conference papers, personal notes, institutional pages, and private conversations. Here, some of those materials are gathered — not as a definitive collection, but as something partial, ongoing, and always in motion.

The site pays particular attention to:

• Philippine history and historiography
• public history and memory
• archives, newspapers, and historical sources
• digital humanities and accessible research tools
• urban history and spatial inequality
• book reviews and reading notes
• research features and scholar spotlights
• conferences, fieldwork, and community engagements

These are not strict boundaries.

Philippine Studies, as understood here, is less a fixed field than an ongoing conversation. It is shaped by scholars and students, certainly, but also by artists, archivists, community workers, and readers. It takes place both within and beyond the Philippines, and often somewhere in between.

Reading group roots

The reading group remains, in many ways, the quiet foundation of this site.

Its past activities — reading lists, discussions, and selected contributions — are kept here not only as records, but as traces of a shared intellectual moment. They reflect a way of working: slowly, collectively, and in dialogue.

At the same time, the site is shifting.

What began as a bounded space is becoming something more open-ended. As an independent platform, it continues to grow outward, taking on new forms, new questions, and new rhythms, while still carrying forward something of that earlier spirit.

About the editor

This site is edited by Mar Ticao, a research postgraduate student whose work focuses on Philippine urban history, public history, and historical representations of Manila during the late Spanish and early American colonial periods.

Her research moves through newspapers, archives, and urban space, with a particular interest in colonial modernity and in how historical narratives shape the ways places are understood, remembered, and lived in today.

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