Sharon Delmendo
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Sharon Delmendo is an English professor at St. John Fisher College.
An alumnus of Occidental College in Los Angeles, Professor Delmendo received her PhD in English in 1993 from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, finishing her dissertation, "Engendering the American Domestic," in Amherst, MA, on a Five College Minority Fellowship at Hampshire College. She is currently a Professor of English at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY and is the youngest faculty member to rise to the rank of full professor at St. John Fisher. Also notable, the Dean of the College bestowed upon her the Teacher-Scholar Award in 1999 and the Board of Trustees' honored her with the Trustees' Distinguished Scholar Award in 2006.
Her book, a research project in Philippine-American studies entitled, "The Star-Entangled Banner: One Hundred Years of America in the Philippines" (Rutgers University Press, 2004), explores the post-colonial anthropological, social and political issues that help to define the relationship between the U.S. and the Philippines. The Star-Entangled Banner was also published in the Philippines in 2006 (University of the Philippines Press, 2006) and was subsequently honored as a finalist for the Philippines' National Book Award in 2006. Her current manuscript in progress is a study of World War II films set in the Philippines, entitled "Pacific Theater: Reel War in the Philippines, 1939–1950."
Professor Delmendo's academic work is characterized by an interdiscplinary method (see: interdisciplinary teaching) that combines elements of american studies, asian studies, history, political science, film theory and literary criticism. Such interdisciplinary methods have become more important as traditional academic research begins to yield to a practical approach that is useful to non-academics, especially for those grappling with the challenges of globalization, international trade, foreign direct investment and foreign policy, because those issues almost always involve cultural misunderstandings. Very often cross cultural transactions are handicapped by the ethnocentrisim of one or more of the transactors and examinations of intercultural historiography holds the promise of reducing the potential for misunderstanding.
Dr. Delmendo's work bears a resemblance to the Annales School of history, although she makes no claim to be a historian, in that she is more interested in the "psychology of the epoch" than she is in the dominant event, such as a war or an independance movement. The root of her work is characterized by the endeavor to understand the cultural lens of Philippine and American nationalism and the resultant "refraction" that the respective national and cultural identities impose upon the topic. Great men or women, then, are often studied not as important subjects in themselves but more as avatars of a particular cultural, nationalistic or historiographical viewpoint while historical events or movements are studied as incubators of the elements of cultural, ethnic and nationalist identities.
In many ways, Dr. Delmendo’s work displays the underpinnings of post-structuralism in that she interprets texts or films to expose meanings that are a product of a cultural or ethnic metanarrative that is as much an artifact of its time, place, ethnic or cultural origin as it is the result of any intended narrative by the author or, in the case of film, director. Therefore, her arguments depend upon an understanding of how a work is related to self identify in terms of the specific sub-categories of ethnic, political and nationalist identities. Very often these expositions focus upon the colonial and post-colonial experiences that have influenced the U.S. and Philippine identities.
