Ramon G. Guillermo is an activist, scholar, and translator.
Born in 1969 to poet Gelacio Guillermo and art critic Alice Guillermo, he obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Philippine Studies at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman before he proceeded to pursue a doctorate in Southeast Asian Studies (Austronestik) from the University of Hamburg in Germany, which he finished with the distinction magna cum laude.
Guillermo is known for his scholarly work on Southeast Asian radical intellectual history, critiques of Zeus Salazar’s Pantayong Pananaw, and translations of radical texts using approaches from translation studies and digital humanities.
Along with his scholarly work, he has also written poetry and fiction. He published the chapbook Agaw-Liwanag in 2004, and the novel Ang Makina ni Mang Turing in 2013 — which won the Book Development Association of the Philippines’ Gintong Aklat Award for Literature in Filipino the following year.
He is a professor at UP and has taught for several years at UP’s Departamento ng Filipino at Panitikan ng Pilipinas. He is also a union leader who served in several capacities in the All UP Academic Employees Union, including as its national president 2011 to 2017. In 2018, he was elected as the Faculty Regent to the UP Board of Regents, the university’s highest governing body, and served in the position until 2020.
Guillermo is currently the director of the UP Center for International Studies and a resident fellow of the Likhaan: UP Institute of Creative Writing.