Isabela Laura C. Lacuna
Assistant Professorial Lecturer
Educational Background
BFA, major in Information Design
Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines
MA major in Literary and Cultural Studies
Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines
PhD in Philosophy (Arts)
University of Western Australia, Australia
Isa Lacuna is a lecturer at De La Salle University in Manila, Philippines. Her scholarship revolves around historicizing storm tropes in eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Tagalog literature, to study the ways in which they inform contemporary stances regarding climate and its many catastrophic iterations in the Philippines. Currently, she is looking to explore how historical ideas about nature in Philippine literature might be extended through an ecophenomenological perspective, with the overall objective of asking what it might mean to embody a particular history of ideas regarding nature. She has presented her research at conferences hosted by the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, the National University of Singapore, Konkuk University, and Nanyang Technological University. Her work has been published by Philippine Studies, The Cordillera Review, eTropic, and Critical Asia Archives. She was a recipient of the Paul Laffey Memorial Prize and the Patricia Crawford Research Award in History at the University of Western Australia in 2022.
Research Interest
- Literature
- Cultural Studies
- Ecocriticism
Selected Publications
- Lacuna, Isa. “Weather on High: Explorations of a Philippine Ecocritical Hermeneutics in the Pasyon of the Late Spanish Colonial Period,” in Oral Traditions in Insular Southeast Asia: Lokaswara Nusantara, 3-27. Edited by Aone van Engelenhoven. New Castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. https://books.google.com.ph/books?hl=en&lr=&id=1d8EEQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&ots=Jo_nPiSMgz&sig=J5YF61GqdF6SVKeSC2Lw1TafNX4&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
- Lacuna, Isa. “A Year of Clouds: Storm and Cloud Tropes Between the Manila Observatory and the Katipunan, 1896-1897.” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints vol 71, no 3 (2023): 345-379. https://philippinestudies.net/ojs/index.php/ps/article/view/5195.
- Lacuna, Isa. “Kundiman and Catastrophe: The Torrential Aesthetics of the Folk Kundiman.” The Cordillera Review XII, no 1/2 (2022): 13-37. https://thecordillerareview.upb.edu.ph/abstract/kundiman-and-catastrophe-the-torrential-aesthetics-of-the-folk-kundiman/
- Lacuna, Isa. Curator and Contributor. “A Short History of Storm-Becoming in Nineteenth-Century Philippine Revolutionary Literature.” Critical Asia Archives. June 2022. https://caarchives.org/topic/postgraduate-2022/.
- Lacuna, Isa. “Access and Affordance: Alvin Yapan’s EDSA (2016) and the Remembrance of Things Not Quite Past.” Critical Asia Archives. December 2021. https://caarchives.org/access-and-affordance-alvin-yapans-edsa-2016-and-the-remembrance-of-things-not-quite-past/.
- Lacuna, Isa. “Sentimentalismong Sintunado: Mga Harana sa La India Elegante y El Indio Amante ni Francisco Balagtas at Ms Serena Serenata ni Merlinda Bobis.” Translated by Alvin Yapan. Katipunan no 8, December 2021. https://ajol.ateneo.edu/katipunan/articles/539/6912.
- Lacuna, Isa. “Atmosfera Rizaliana: The Metonymic Journeys of Weather in Jose Rizal’s Writing.” eTropic Special Issue. September 2021. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.20.2.2021.3806.
- Ong, Timothy and Isa Lacuna, editors. Latag: Essays on Philippine Literature, Culture, and the Environment. Quezon City: Likhaan U.P. Institute of Creative Writing, 2019.
- Lacuna, Isa. “Ang Birhen at ang Hari ng mga Bagyo,” [The Virgin and the King of Storms] Katipunan, no 4, 2019, pp. 131-158.