He received his Ph.D. from UCLA. His book, Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals (Stanford University Press, 2005), examines multiple responses to colonial, national, and racial challenges through the lived experiences and rhetoric of transpacific Filipino writers, who were among the pioneers of Filipino migration to the United States. His next major project is a comparative study of several generations of Filipino, Puerto Rican, and Cuban transnational, exilic intellectuals in the aftermath of the Spanish- Cuban-American War and the Philippine-American War of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries.