Adrian de Leon

Adrian De Leon is Assistant Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles. His research and creative practice investigate indigeneity, settlers of color, and labor politics in Scarborough and the Filipino diaspora across the Pacific. Adrian graduated from UTSC’s Specialist Program in English with a BA (Honours, with Distinction) in 2014. He completed his PhD in History at the University of Toronto in 2019, where he was a Junior Fellow and Don of Hall at Massey College. Adrian’s research was supported by grants from SSHRC, Fulbright, and various universities. His first book, Rouge, was published in 2018 by Mawenzi House. With fellow UTSC Creative Writing alum Téa Mutonji and Natasha Ramoutar, Adrian is an editor of the collection FEEL WAYS: A Scarborough Anthology.
As an undergrad at UTSC, Adrian initially pursued student politics and campus leadership. In 2013, he was elected as VP Academics at the Scarborough Campus Students’ Union. In 2014, he co-founded and served as the first President of SELF, was among the first members (and conference delegates) of Sigma Tau Delta, all while serving on the Governing Council of UofT. Being involved on campus and getting to know faculty mentors inspired Adrian to pursue research as an undergraduate student. In 2013, he co-founded the Interdisciplinary Research and Discovery Symposium. That summer, while working with Prof. Marjorie Rubright, he received a research grant to travel to the Philippines and Hawai‘i and study Filipino diasporic literatures and labor history. The results became his ENGD98 capstone project (supervised by Profs. Neal Dolan and Maria Assif), and an essay at the UTSC Humanities Conference. For the latter paper, he won Best Paper in English. The insights and networks he gained as an undergraduate researcher continue to inform his scholarly work. 
After working in the IT profession for some time, Adrian entered as a Direct-Entry student into the doctoral program of the Department of History. As a graduate student, he has served as Managing Editor of the Global Food History journal, and sits on the Editorial Collective of the Graduate Journal for Food Studies. In 2015, he was admitted as a Junior Fellow at Massey College, and in the following year was elected as the Don of Hall. His research has been supported by SSHRC, the Fulbright Scholarship Program, and various institutions in North America. Adrian has published scholarly essays in the following journals: Gastronomica (2016); Food, Culture & Society (2017); Radical History Review (2018); and Amerasia (2019). He plans to publish a trilogy of monographs that traces Philippine indigeneity and migrant labor from the nineteenth century through World War II.
Check out  more on Rouge here: https://www.mawenzihouse.com/product/rouge/