History

Febe Pamonag

Dr. Febe Pamonag, Professor

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, Fulbright Award Winner, Multicultural Teaching Excellence Award, WIU University Research Council Award Winner

Dr. Febe Pamonag joined the department in fall 2007 as its specialist in Asian history. Prof. Pamonag received her Ph.D. in 2006 from the University of Alberta. She offers the department's upper-division courses on the history of China [History 345], Japan [History 346], women in Asian history [History342], cross-listed with Women’s Studies [History 342], topics in Asian history [History 485 (G)], survey courses on Asian history [History 245] and World history [History 116], which are available for Humanities and Multicultural General Education credit, and graduate seminars on postwar Japan, U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines, the Asia-Pacific War in history and popular culture, and global history of food and disease [History 530 and 531].

Prof. Pamonag’s research interests include women’s movements, imperial medicine and public health, and history of food. She has published articles in several journals, including the Pacific Historical Review, U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, and Social Science Diliman: A Philippine Journal of Society and Change. She also published “Women and Social Movements in the Philippines during the American Empire, 1900-1940,” in Indigenous Women’s Voices in North America, American Empire, and the Global South, 1820-2020: A Syllabus with Documents (Alexander Street Press, 2024). She is currently working on a monograph on patient activism at the Culion leprosarium in the U.S.-occupied Philippines.

Prof. Pamonag also served as Associate Editor of the “Filipino Women and American Empire” team of the “Women and Modern Empires [WAME], 1840 to the present”, directed by historians Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin. This peer-reviewed online collection was co-published by the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender at the State University of New York, Binghamton, and Alexander Street Press of Alexandria, Virginia (2017).

Prof. Pamonag has won several grants and awards. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship and an NEH Summer Stipend for her project on Hansen’s disease patients' activism in early twentieth-century Philippines. She was one of sixteen post-secondary instructors in the United States selected to participate in the Fulbright-Hays Seminars Abroad to China in summer 2013. She also won two WIU University Research Council Grants and two WIU Faculty Summer Stipends to support her research.

Prof. Pamonag has supervised graduate and undergraduate students’ research on a wide range of topics. Many of her students have won awards: Leia Hastings’s paper “Ghost of Tsushima: A Video Game’s Potential in an Educational Setting” was Best Graduate Paper at the 2022 Illinois Regional Phi Alpha Theta Conference; Luke Hobbs’s paper “Wartime Japan and the Homefront” won the 2021 Department of History’s William & Doris Burton Writing Award in History; Luke Josey’s paper “Navigating Article 9: The Evolution of the Maritime Self-Defense Force in Postwar Japan” won the 2019 Burton Writing Award in History; Nancy Dixon’s paper “Silenced and Naked People: Representations of the Filipinos at the Quincy Museum” was first-place winner in the 2017 WIU Graduate Research Presentation; Samantha Heinrich's paper "The 'Savage' Filipinos and Their Dog-Eating Habits" was honorable mention in the best paper, graduate category, in the 2016 Phi Alpha Theta Regional Conference; Madeline Olejnik’s paper “Representations of Women in Post-1949 China” was a co-winner in the Department of History’s 2014-2015 Judy Ellen Thompson Prize for Best Undergraduate Paper in a History Course; and Lauren Armstead was the Department of History’s first-place winner in the 2012 Undergraduate Research Day poster competition for “Maternal Bond in Hiroshima Narratives of Survival.”

Prof. Pamonag currently serves as co-advisor of the Omicron Omicron chapter of Phi Alpha Theta (History Honor Society). When not working, she enjoys learning other languages, yoga, and traveling.

Dr. Pamonag receiving Provost's Award for Excellence

Dr. Pamonag receives the Provost's Award for Excellence