Born and raised in the state of Washington, I have lived in New York state since 1997. I am a professor in the Department of American Studies at St. John Fisher College, where I’ve taught since 1998. I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines from 1988 to 1990. In 2007 I was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Can Tho University in Vietnam. I earned my Ph.D. at the University of Hawaii in 1999; my dissertation about American photography in the 1970s became my first book, Through the Lens of the City: NEA Photography Surveys of the 1970s (University Press of Mississippi, 2005). My second book, Dean Worcester’s Fantasy Islands: Photography, Film, and the Colonial Philippines (University of Michigan Press, 2014; Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2015) won the 2016 Gintong Aklat (Golden Book Award) in Social Sciences and was a finalist for the 2016 Philippine National Book Award in History. In addition to these two books, I’ve published articles in American Quarterly, Journal of Transnational American Studies, Australasian Journal of American Studies, and History of Photography. I am a two-time recipient of the Trustees Award for Distinguished Scholarly Achievement, the highest honor bestowed by St. John Fisher College.

Nerissa Balce was educated in the classrooms and museums of Manila and the libraries of Berkeley, California. She read feminist literature and poststructuralist theories in college and consequently ditched her plans to become a nun. She identifies as a mongrel academic – an Asian Americanist with a mixed (and questionable) pedigree: one who does a little bit of literature, theory, popular culture, diasporic and Philippine texts. If empires used various media to promote the romance of conquest, it makes sense to have an expansive approach to studying Filipino culture and the global Filipino diaspora. Her book, Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images, and the American Archive (University of Michigan Press, 2016) "is a study of abjection in American visual culture and popular literature from the Philippine-American War (1899–1902)."

I was born in Dumaguete City, Negros Oriental, in the Philippines and moved to settle in upstate New York with my family in 1983, to the soundtrack of Michael Jackson's Thriller. I attended Princeton University, where, after dutifully considering a pre-med-friendly major, I ended up immersed in English literature, dance, and African American Studies, while fielding questions of "what will you do with that degree?" With the benefit of close faculty mentorship, I ended up in the University of California, Berkeley's Ethnic Studies program, which nurtured my interests in race, gender, and US cultural politics and history. My first book, Securing Paradise (2013), which looks at US militarism and tourism in Hawai'i and the Philippines, was the result of that journey. I am currently working on a couple more experimental projects: the first is a mixed-genre narrative of the life of Isabel Rosario Cooper, infamously known as Douglas MacArthur's mistress. The other is a co-edited decolonial guide to Hawai'i. In these projects, I pursue what it means to unsettle power from the position of the margins.