Dr Cristina Martinez-Juan

Dr Maria Cristina Juan is a scholar and curator specializing in transnational Philippine cultural studies, with a focus on material culture, digital humanities, and the repatriation of dispersed heritage. 

She is a member of the research and teaching faculty in the SOAS School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, where she contributes lectures on the Philippines to modules in Southeast Asian Studies, Area Studies, and Postcolonial Studies. She is a member of the Editorial Board of South East Asia Research and serves as Chair of the SOAS Provenance, Accessibility, Repatriation and Restitution (PARR) Working Group, a role she has held since the group’s establishment in 2023. In 2017, she spearheaded the establishment of Philippine Studies at SOAS (PSS) under the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, an interdisciplinary forum for Philippine-related teaching, research, and cultural production in the UK.

With training in Digital Humanities from Leiden University and the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, she has developed projects that provide open access to colonial archives and reconnect dispersed collections with communities of origin. Her projects include Digital Filipiniana and Mapping Philippine Material Culture, a global visual inventory of Philippine objects held in overseas institutions. She is the Principal Investigator for two AHRC-funded projects on decolonizing Southeast Asian sound archives and digitally reconstructing the lost Library of San Pablo following the British invasion of Manila in 1762.

Dr Juan is the editor of five volumes in Philippine Studies and the author of several white papers documenting case studies on the repatriation of Philippine heritage objects. Her most recent edited book, The 1762 British Invasion of Spanish-Ruled Philippines: Beyond Imperial and National Imaginaries (2024), provides historical context for the digital reconstruction of the Lost Library of San Agustin. She holds an MA in Museum, Heritage and Material Culture Studies from SOAS and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of the Philippines Diliman.

• Post-colonial Studies
• Cultural Studies
• Repatriation
• Restitution
• Philippine Post-colonial and Comparative Literature Studies
• British Occupation of Manila
• Philippine languages and linguistics
• Ethnography of Communication Writing systems
• Southeast Asian Studies