Filipino historian, literary critic and National Artist whose scholarship elevated the study of Cebu and Philippine intellectual history
Resil B. Mojares, the Filipino historian, literary critic and National Artist for Literature, has died aged 83. Through more than twenty books and five decades of teaching and research, he documented the literature, theatre, politics, religious practices and intellectual life of the Philippines, with particular attention to Cebu and the Visayas.
Mojares worked across literary criticism, biography, political history and cultural history. His books examined subjects ranging from the emergence of the Filipino novel to the development of Cebuano theatre, the careers of Filipino intellectuals under Spanish and American colonial rule, the Philippine-American War in Cebu and the history of museums in the Philippines. He combined archival research with close attention to texts, institutions and individual lives.
His first book, Cebuano Literature: A Survey and Bio-Bibliography with Finding List (1975), provided a systematic account of writing in Cebuano and identified printed and manuscript materials available for further study. It was closely connected to his work at the Cebuano Studies Center, which he founded at the University of San Carlos in 1975. Under his direction, the center assembled books, periodicals, manuscripts and other sources relating to the history and culture of Cebu and the wider Visayas.
In Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel: A Generic Study of the Novel Until 1940 (1983), Mojares reconstructed the development of the novel in Spanish, English and several Philippine languages. Rather than treating the Filipino novel as the product of a single linguistic tradition, he examined the different forms through which fiction developed under colonial rule and during the early decades of the twentieth century.
His subsequent books extended this research into social and political history. Theater in Society, Society in Theater: Social History of a Cebuano Village, 1840–1940 (1985) used theatrical activity to study social relations within a Cebuano community. The Man Who Would Be President: Serging Osmeña and Philippine Politics (1986) examined the political career of Sergio “Serging” Osmeña Jr., while Vicente Sotto: The Maverick Senator (1992) traced the life of the Cebuano journalist, writer and politician.
In The War against the Americans: Resistance and Collaboration in Cebu, 1899–1906 (1999), Mojares studied the military conflict and political accommodations that accompanied the establishment of American rule in Cebu. The book reconstructed the actions of revolutionaries, local officials and members of the provincial elite through records produced during and after the war.
His best-known work of intellectual history, Brains of the Nation: Pedro Paterno, T. H. Pardo de Tavera, Isabelo de los Reyes, and the Production of Modern Knowledge (2006), followed three Filipino intellectuals through the final decades of Spanish colonial government and the beginning of American rule. Mojares examined their work in history, folklore, linguistics, politics and the emerging social sciences. He returned to Isabelo de los Reyes in Isabelo’s Archive (2013), a collection of studies on archives, knowledge and colonial society.
Mojares was born on September 4, 1943, in Polanco, Zamboanga del Norte. His parents were public school teachers. He attended public schools in Mindanao before studying at Silliman University in Dumaguete and the University of San Carlos in Cebu City. He completed a bachelor’s degree in English at San Carlos in 1964 and a master’s degree in literature there in 1969. In 1979, he obtained his doctorate in literature from the University of the Philippines Diliman.
He began teaching at the University of San Carlos in 1965. Before concentrating on historical and cultural scholarship, he wrote short stories and worked as a journalist. His fiction received prizes from the Philippines Free Press and the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.
Mojares also wrote the column “Sticks and Stones” for The Freeman. The column ran from September 1, 1970, until September 23, 1972, the day the implementation of martial law was publicly announced. He was arrested at his home and detained at Camp Sergio Osmeña in Cebu. Mojares later identified his incarceration as a turning point that led him away from short-story writing and daily journalism and toward sustained research into Philippine society and history.
He directed the Cebuano Studies Center from its establishment in 1975 until 1996. He subsequently served as editor and business manager of San Carlos Publications from 1996 to 1999. He retired from the university in 2000 and was appointed professor emeritus in 2005.
Except for visiting academic appointments, Mojares conducted most of his career in Cebu. He held visiting positions or fellowships at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Hawai‘i, the University of Michigan, the University of California, Los Angeles, Kyoto University and the National University of Singapore. From 2007, he served as general editor of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation’s Book of Records Project. He was also a member of the editorial board of Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints.
His essays were collected in House of Memory (1997), Waiting for Mariang Makiling: Essays in Philippine Cultural History (2002) and Interrogations in Philippine Cultural History (2017). His later publications included History of the Province of Cebu (2014), The Feast of the Santo Niño: An Introduction to the History of a Cebuano Devotion (2017) and Enigmatic Objects: Notes towards a History of the Museum in the Philippines (2023). He coedited More Cebuano Than We Admit: Aspects of Cebuano History, Culture and Society (2023) with Hope Sabanpan-Yu. A selection of his writings appeared as The Resil Mojares Reader in 2015.
Mojares received six Philippine National Book Awards. His other distinctions included the Cultural Center of the Philippines Centennial Award for Cultural Research, the Grant Goodman Prize in Historical Studies, the Fok Ying Tung Southeast Asia Prize and the Gawad Tanglaw ng Lahi, conferred by Ateneo de Manila University in 2013.
In 2018, he was named National Artist for Literature, becoming the first Cebuano to receive the country’s highest official recognition for artists. The award acknowledged a body of work that had made Cebuano literature, regional archives and provincial political history part of the broader study of Philippine culture.
The University of San Carlos formally opened the Resil B. Mojares Collection at its Talamban campus on March 24, 2025. The collection preserves his books, papers and research materials for use by future scholars.
Mojares married Salvacion Ouano Go who passed away in 2022. They had four children: Kim Carmel, Mark Soren, Ressa Gail and Anna Leigh.
Resil B. Mojares, historian and literary critic, born September 4, 1943; died September 5, 2026.