Allan E. S. Lumba is a writer, researcher, and teacher of the Philippines and the world. Lumba engages questions of racial capitalism, imperialism, and decolonization through materialist theoretical approaches, drawing from: political economy, postcolonial, feminist, ethnic, queer, and disability studies. His book, Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines from Duke University Press, charts the historical entanglements and tensions between race, knowledge, sovereignty, and the capitalist market in the United States and the Philippines. At present he is at work on two follow-up research projects. The first is a history of the U.S. dollar’s relation to the global proliferation of mass punishment systems. The second is an infrastructural history of sinking cities around Asia and the Pacific. He is currently an assistant professor of history at Concordia University in unceded Tiohtià:ke, also known as Montréal.

Lumba was born in New Jersey and raised in Pasay, Philippines for much of the 1980s, witnessing the rise of People Power and the fall of the Marcos dictatorship. In late 1986 he then migrated with his family to the Pacific Northwest, where they bounced around, staying with various extended relatives for almost a year. Eventually Lumba’s family resided in Portland, Oregon, where he would spend most of his youth. Lumba would go on to earn a B.S. in history from Oregon State University. After over a year of taking post-bac ethnic studies classes at OSU, playing and recording music in several bands, and working at a local Corvallis bakery, Lumba moved to San Francisco.

He would go on to earn an M.A. from the Department of History at San Francisco State University and a Ph.D. from the Department of History at the University of Washington. He has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including the Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Grant, Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, and residential fellowships at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Bentley Library at the University of Michigan. In 2012 he was awarded the best Comparative Ethnic Studies paper at the American Studies Association annual meeting. While conducing doctoral research in the Philippines he performed and recorded under the name multo. He has also been a visiting research fellow at the Third World Studies Center at the University of Philippines and the Asian Center at Ateneo de Manila University. Previously he served as a Global American Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan, and an Assistant Professor of history at Virginia Tech.