Allan E. S. Lumba is a historian of hard infrastructures, ecological finance, and technopolitics in Asia and the Pacific. He engages questions of racial capitalism, imperialism, decolonization, and degrowth. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of History at the University of Washington. His book, Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines, charts the historical intersections and tensions between race, knowledge, sovereignty, and the capitalist market in the United States and the Philippines.
He is currently at work on an infrastructural history of sinking cities around Asia and the Pacific, titled “Subsidence: Surfacing Life in a Sinking City.” This project has received funding from the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University (2024) and the SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2024–2026).
He has published articles in the journals Diplomatic History, Radical History Review, Critical Ethnic Studies, and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, as well as chapters in editorial collections such as A Cultural History of Money and Credit: A Global Perspective, The Gilded Age and Progressive Era: The Making of Modern America, Histories of Racial Capitalism, and For Antifascist Futures.
Previously, he served as Global American Studies postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center (2013–2015), Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan (2015–2018), and assistant professor at Virginia Tech. He has received numerous research awards, including the Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Grant, Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, and multiple university grants and fellowships from the University of Washington and Virginia Tech. He has also served as resident fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the University of Michigan’s Bentley Library.