Patricio N. Abinales retired as a Professor from the Department of Asian Studies, University of Hawai’i-Manoa in 2025 and completed a six-month research fellowship at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, last August, where he was working on a manuscript on everyday authoritarianism in the University of the Philippines during the Marcos era.
Abinales grew up in the northern Mindanao city of Ozamiz and studied at the University of the Philippines and Cornell University.
His first book was a co-authored one. Transnational Corporations in the Philippine Banana Export Industry was a study of corporate agriculture in southern Mindanao conducted by the University of the Philippines Third World Studies Center (TWS).
In 1998, Abinales published his first single-authored book, Images of State Power: Essays on Philippine Politics, from the Margins with the University of the Philippines Press. This was followed by Making Mindanao: Cotabato and Davao in the Formation of the Philippine State, 1900-1972, published by Ateneo de Manila University Press in 2000 (and republished in 2020). In 2001, the University of the Philippines Press published his Fellow Traveler: Essays on Filipino Communism, which won the National Book Award for the Social Sciences.
In 2005, he and his late wife, Donna J. Amoroso, co-authored State and Society in the Philippines, published by Rowman and Littlefield (an expanded edition was released in 2017). In 2010, he wrote Orthodoxy and History in the Muslim Mindanao Narrative, which was published by Ateneo de Manila University Press.
His last four books are The Contemporary World, a 2021 college textbook he co-wrote with Professor Lisandro Claudio of the University of California-Berkeley and put out by C&E Publishing Inc., of Manila; Modern Philippines, which was published in 2022 by ABC-Clio Greenwood Press; The Marcos Era Reader, which he co-edited with Leah Castañeda-Anastacio, published in 2022 by Ateneo de Manila University Press; and Presidents and Pests, Cosmopolitans and Communists, which came out of Ateneo de Manila University Press in 2023.
Abinales wrote two non-academic books with Anvil Publishing: Love, Sex and the Filipino Communist, or Hinggil sa Pagpigil ng Panggigigil, in 2004, and Joys of Dislocation: Essays on Mindanao, Region, Nation, in 2008. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing. He is currently working on a third book, Global Cuisines: The Philippines, for ABC-Clio Greenwood Press.
He lives in Quezon City with his wife, the book historian Patricia May Jurilla, and their two dogs, Caxton and Pinpin, and commutes to Honolulu to visit his daughter Angela.
