Resil B. Mojares(1943)

Resil B. Mojares, is a professor emeritus at the University of San Carlos and a member of the editorial board of the Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints. He was named a National Artist in Literature in 2018. Resil B. Mojares was born on  September 4, 1943 in Polanco, Zamboanga del Norte. 

He attended public schools in Mindanao before attending Silliman University in Dumaguete City and the University of San Carlos (USC) in Cebu City. He began teaching at University of zsan Carlos (USC) in 1965 and became the Cebuano Studies Center's founding director ten years later. In 1979, he received his PhD in Literature from the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman. Aside from time as a visiting scholar in the United States, Japan, and Singapore, he is a homegrown intellectual.

He also one of the first Cebuanos to become a political prisoner during Martial Law, arrested on September 23, 1972, the day Marcos announced that he had placed the Philippines under Martial law.

Resil B. Mojares is married to Salvacion Ouano Go, and has four children together: Kim Carmel, Mark Soren, Ressa Gail, and Anna Leigh. He resides in Barangay Talamban in Cebu City. 

Literature of Resil B. Mojares

He has written over twenty books and contributed numerous essays and articles in popular and scholarly publications. His books include such groundbreaking works as Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel (1983), Theater in Society, Society in Theater (1985), and the 

      Interrogations in Philippine Cultural History (2017).

The Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel is a generic study of the Filipino novel situates its development in the context of the narrative tradition and social history of the Philippines. It marks out lines of descent, identifies shifts in modes of narrative representation, considers literary changes in relation to the larger society, and thus offers the reader with a view of the novel not only in itself but also in history.

Theater in Society, Society in Theater is both a detailed and imaginative reconstruction of the history of a Philippine village, the barrio of Valladolid in Carcar, southern Cebu, Though the history ranges from the 1500s to 1940, the focus is trained on a time of increased peasantization, the late nineteenth century and the first four decades of the twentieth century. In tracing the history of the village, the author analyzes transformations in its moral order as revealed in the external and internal changes of the village theater tradition, the tradition of the linambay, or komedya.

This article Interrogations in Philippine Cultural History diverse issues in Philippine cultural history: the place of Nick Joaquin in the nation's historiography; the debate on the class position of Andres Bonifacio and the revolutionary outbreak of 1896; Filipino-Spanish interactions in the world of print; the social history of religious devotions; the state of regional literary studies and the case of Filipino crime fiction; and Philippine electoral politics as seen in the cracked mirror of Pascual Racuyal's career. The book ends with the author's reflections on the past four decades of Philippine cultural studies.

Awards of Resil B. Mojares

Resil B. Mojares received several "best book" awards from the Philippine National Book Awards and Book Development Association of the Philippines. His scholarship has been recognized by the Cultural Center of the Philippines Centennial Awards, the Grant Goodman Prize in Philippine History, Hong Kong's Fok Ying Tung Southeast Asia Prize, and the Gawad Tanglaw ng Lahi.