Dr Hana Qugana (she/her) is an intellectual, cultural, and environmental historian of empire, with a focus on Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Her work explores how metropolitan identities are continuously reshaped by global entanglements, and how communities residing in the interstitial spaces of empire negotiate, survive, and resist imperial structures.

Her research is interdisciplinary, engaging with the environmental humanities, sound studies, heritage studies, and memoryscapes. She is currently working on a monograph about the public life of environmental history in maritime Southeast Asia, while continuing to develop collaborative projects that link the global history of climate and migration to present-day realities.

She maintains a specialist interest in Philippine history and Philippine-British relations, surfacing underrepresented narratives across this spectrum: from the legacy and commemorations of the Manila occupation by Indian sepoys during the Seven Years’ War, to the deep historical presence of Filipinos in Britain. By tracing this diaspora—from the intelligentsia navigating Europe’s wider anti-colonial underground and seafarers who established their own ‘little Manilas’ beyond the seas in the 1880s, to the contemporary landscape of political refugees, nurses and careworkers—her research grounds present-day migration within longer imperial trajectories that defy categories of colonised and coloniser, and assumptions of one-way migrant travel operationalised by imperial and post-colonial states. To document these trajectories, she combines digital archival methods with community-engaged, ethnographic fieldwork to develop accessible histories of the global Philippine community.

Prior to Sussex, Dr Qugana was a Lecturer in Liberal Studies at NYU London and Teaching Fellow in Global History at Queen Mary University of London, after completing her PhD at University College London in 2017. She received her MPhil (cum laude) in Colonial and Global History from Leiden University in the Netherlands, and has held visiting fellowships at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka (University of Otago) and Yale University.

She was made a Senior Fellow of AdvanceHE/Higher Education Academy (SFHEA) in 2025, in recognition of her sustained leadership in curriculum design and the development of inclusive, experiential pedagogies.

She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (FRAS) in 2026.