Elaine Kathryn Andres is an educator, strategist, and interdisciplinary researcher.

My interests span popular music and performance studies, feminist cultural studies, comparative ethnic studies, and popular cultures of U.S. empire. My first book project, Resounding Im/Mobilities: Critical Acoustics of Filipinx Musical Transits theorizes how Filipinx American musicians make audible the tensions of creative migrancy: between movement and constraint, racial legibility and ambiguity, imitation and craft. I propose “critical acoustics” as a mode of listening attuned to how and where performers move that registers the interferences, distortions, echoes, and reverberations of empire that shape how we come to produce, listen to, and make meaning of Filipinx American musical performance.

Drawing on archival research, musical analysis, performance observations, and interviews, I constellate scenes across the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, the U.K., and the Philippines. In doing so, I demonstrate how complex histories of empire and militarization shape enduring Filipinx American intimacies with Black and Latinx communities and sound cultures, unsettling the racial and spatial hierarchies that shape popular music and its reception. Focusing on the moving performances of mixed-race Filipino American artists—including Sugar Pie DeSanto, Joe Bataan, Bruno Mars, H.E.R., and Saweetie—I theorize local sound cultures as sites of imperial intimacy where taxonomies of race, place, genre, and authenticity are contested.

I have presented my research and facilitated workshops and roundtables at annual conferences of the American Studies Association and the Association for Asian American Studies, “Music of Asian America: History, Activism, and Collaborations” — a convening co-sponsored by the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival and the Music of Asian America Research Center, and at Pop Con. I have also delivered guest lectures and invited talks at the University of California, Irvine, the University of Minnesota, and Spelman College.

I am currently a Panda Express Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylania. I completed my Ph.D. in Culture & Theory with designated emphases in gender and sexuality studies, Asian American studies, and visual studies at the University of California, Irvine. I earned my B.A. in Rhetoric with Honors at the University of California, Berkeley.

In my consulting practice, I draw on my experiences across higher education, policy advocacy, and grassroots organizations to support leaders, teams, organizations, and coalitions building power for working-class communities.

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