Hello! Welcome to my site! I am a historian, musicologist, and pianist. I come from a working class family in Tarlac, a landlocked province in the Philippines suffused with quiet bamboo trees and verdant rice fields. Growing up in the Global South, my personal identity, history, and experiences have profoundly shaped my worldview and positionality in this planet that we live in—nurturing resilience, an unyielding work ethic, and fierce enthusiasm for knowledge.
While music, sound, and books are my constant companions in life, I am also an ardent observer of people. Stolen glances, whispered conversations, and tearful farewells—these all tell meaningful stories I could not resist. Therefore, it should not be a surprise that stories and narratives of ordinary people sit at the core of my scholarly interests.
In my research, I broadly consider the sensory and social history of modern Germany both during the rise of the Nazi Party and the tenure of the Drittes Reich set against the backdrop of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Specifically, I am currently exploring a sensory history of the Konzentrationslager system, as a network of death-worlds, in the Germanosphere between 1933-1945. The scope of my scholarly work allows me to also explore the following related motifs: the history of lethal sciences (involuntary euthanasia, eugenics, and human experiments) in Nazi Europe, their function as a '“rehearsal” for Genocide, and their legacy within discussions of biopower, biopolitics, and bioethics; the musical memories of the Armenian Genocide; the history of transnational solidarity between Jews and Filipinos; the poetics and politics of listening to Genocide survivors; and Filipino cultural labor in interwar Europe and United States. Furthermore, I also maintain interests in topics such as the First World War and the historiography of Genocide. In my free time, I listen to BTS and Taylor Swift while also writing about the hybridity of their artistic output and the intellectual and affective labor of their fandoms.
My writing has appeared in the Journal of Asian American Studies, the International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, and The American Music Teacher. I have also presented at various conferences in the United States and overseas.
Moreover, my research on modern Germany, the Holocaust, and the Armenian Genocide has received multiple grants from the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies and the Mead Witter School of Music. Other research and creative projects were supported by the UW-Madison Division of the Arts.
I received a Master of Arts in Historical Musicology and a Master of Music in Piano from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Currently, I am a research fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum-Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in Washington, D.C. and begin the critical foundations of my dissertation project. In September 2024, I will begin the M.A.-Ph.D. program in History (Modern Europe) with a concurrent terminal M.A. in Public Humanities (Museums/Curation track) at Brown University in Providence, RI.
As a scholar-musician, one of my goals is to bring my research to a wider audience using methods from the digital humanities and music performance, generating both public and further scholarly engagement. Current initiatives include a storymap version of my recent public history-recital project “Music, Exile, and Genocide,” reconstruction of several compositions (including piano and vocal pieces) by Dachau political prisoner Leon Kaczmarek, an interactive sound map of 1930s Chicago through the experience of Filipino composer Nicanor Abelardo, and a remodeling and reconstruction of Konzentrationslager soundscapes based on my dissertation research.
Furthermore, I believe in the power of interdisciplinary methods when it comes to teaching. As an instructor and teaching assistant for the Keyboard and Musicology departments, I strived to incorporate culturally responsive projects in my curriculum and sensorial-experiential based methods of critical thinking in my classroom activities. For this, the UW-Madison Graduate School awarded my efforts with the Innovation in Teaching Award in 2022.
Finally, I also enjoyed a substantial career as a performer and working artist. I have graced the stages of different venues such as the Carnegie Hall, the Harpa Concert Hall, and Ganz Hall both as a chamber musician and a soloist. Between 2017-2022, I worked as a pianist/conductor for dance companies and equity theatres in Chicago and New York.