Mark Redondo Villegas, Ph.D.

Mark Redondo Villegas is an assistant professor in American Studies at Franklin & Marshall College. He received his Ph.D. in Culture and Theory at the University of California, Irvine and M.A. in Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.  In 2021, he was a postdoctoral fellow for the Inclusion Imperative’s Visiting Faculty Fellowship Program at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County’s Dresher Center for the Humanities.

His book, Manifest Technique: Hip Hop, Empire, and Visionary Filipino American Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2021), examines Filipino Americans’ decades-long commitment to crafting, worldmaking, and collaborating in hip hop culture. He argues that hip hop culture has operated as a critical site where Filipino Americans have been investigating their racial position in history and the world, thus expanding the opportunities for these practitioners to author their popular representation. You can follow Manifest Technique on Facebook and Instagram.

Mark has two book projects currently in development. His next book monograph, tentatively titled Geek Hop: Study, Science, and Orientalism in Hip Hop Culture, examines hip hop’s “b-side” (lesser-known) core aesthetic and politics: the “geeky” elements reflected in comic book culture, martial arts, anime, and science fiction. Rather than adjacent to hip hop’s central themes, he shows how geek culture has always been integral to hip hop. His other future book project, tentatively titled Look Out Weekend! Parties, Promoters, and Filipino American Visual Culture, will provide critical insight into Filipino American visual culture from the late 1970s to 1990s throughout the United States. This project will curate the visual representations young Filipino Americans were creating in their advertisements for their birthday celebrations, graduations, collegiate club programs, and weekend jams.

He published “Redefined What Is Meant to be Divine: Prayer and Protest in Blue Scholars” in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly (Vol. 41, Number 3), “Nation in the Universe: The Cosmic Vision of Afro-Filipino Futurism” in Amerasia Journal (Vol. 43, Number 2, 2017), and “Currents of Militarization, Flows of Hip Hop: Expanding the Geographies of Filipino American Culture” in the Journal of Asian American Studies (Vol. 19, Number 1, 2016). He is also co-editor of the pioneering anthology Empire of Funk: Hip Hop and Representation in Filipina/o America (Cognella Academic Press 2014).

Mark began his academic career as an independent, community-based filmmaker. His films have appeared in classrooms, conferences, and film festivals around the United States and in the Philippines. His works largely focus on Filipino American communities and hip hop culture. He has taught in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego, the University of California, Irvine, California State University, Long Beach, and the University of Florida.