Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez

September 01, 2020

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Assistant Professor Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez

Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work centers on the connections between plant species, politics, and modern history with a focus on the Philippines and greater Southeast Asia. Her writing and research to date have contributed to the history of science in the Philippines, weaving and textile studies, and the environmental humanities. Her work has been published in the Asian Review of World Histories and the Philippine Journal of Systematic Biology, with forthcoming contributions to the edited volumes Empire and Environment: Confronting Ecological Ruination in the Asia-Pacific and the Americas and Women in the History of Science: A Liberating the Curriculum Sourcebook. She has been a visiting faculty member and researcher in the International Studies Department at De La Salle University, Manila and the Facultad de Informática at Complutense University in Madrid.

In 2021-2022, she will be a Humanities Mellon Fellow at the New York Botanical Garden, where she will work on a book manuscript drawn from her dissertation. Completed in 2020, her dissertation is a history of colonial Philippine botany (1858–1936) narrated through the scientific lives and work of a Filipino illustrator, a Spanish botanist, and a U.S. plant collector. The dissertation argues that regional floristic space as defined by botanists became the grounds for inter-imperial intellectual exchange and collaboration, and that region-making was a key strategy deployed by both Spain and the U.S. to assert imperial dominance on the global stage. Her doctoral research was funded in part by the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright-Hays program of the Department of Education, The Huntington Library, and the Bentley Historical Library.

Kathleen graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies and a Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. While at Berkeley, she re-established and co-coordinated the Filipino and Philippine Studies Working Group, an intellectual hub for faculty and students that hosts events featuring emerging research in the fields. She equally devoted her service work to address publicly the failures of Title IX reporting structures on campus. For her efforts, she received the 2017 RISE Leadership Award from Berkeley’s Gender Equity Resource Center. In Fall 2020, she will be a panelist for the Digital Dialogues roundtable on gender equality in the academy hosted by the Association for Asian Studies.

Prior to her career in research and higher education, Kathleen worked for seven years overseeing youth programs and community advocacy at the California School Health Alliance, an Oakland-based nonprofit that advances K-12 school-based healthcare across the state. She was also a transnational Philippine community organizer and a participant in Bay Area theater projects. A heritage scholar from the city of Los Angeles, Kathleen owes her commitment to Southeast Asian Studies to the labor of health educators supporting L.A.’s Southeast Asian immigrant populations.