Presenter bios
Bios are organised by the presenter's surname, in alphabetical order.
ASABA, YUIKO
Yuiko Asaba is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Research Fellow at the Royal College of Music, London. Her current research centers on the transoceanic circulations of Argentine tango in Japan and China as a window into the rarely investigated East Asia-Latin America musical nexus. Yuiko’s forthcoming book, currently titled Tango in Japan: Performing and Orchestrating a Distant Music (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024), offers the first in-depth study on Japan-Argentina musical connections dating back to the 1910s up to the present. She is also a tango violinist and has previously worked professionally as a member of tango orchestras in Argentina and Japan.
CANNON, ALEXANDER M.
Alexander M. Cannon is an associate professor in the Department of Music at the University of Birmingham (UK). He holds undergraduate degrees in economics and music from Pomona College and an MA and PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Michigan. He studies traditional and popular musics of southern Vietnam and of Vietnamese diasporas, and has publications in Asian Music, Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, and the Journal of Vietnamese Studies. His recent book, Seeding the Tradition: Musical Creativity in Southern Vietnam (Wesleyan University Press, 2022), explores creativity in southern Vietnamese music practice.
CHEN, YUHAO
YuHao Chen is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Pittsburgh. His doctoral work probes Sinophone notations through the lens of sound studies and disability histories, using materials from disability pedagogy, phonetic science, and the script reform movement to embody notated Chinese sounds from the turn of the twentieth century.
CHEUNG, BERNICE HOI CHING
Bernice Hoi Ching Cheung is a PhD ethnomusicology student at the University of Toronto, where she is also enrolled in the Graduate Collaborative Diaspora and Transnationalism Studies Specialization. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Canada, she holds a Bachelor of Music in Integrated Studies and a Bachelor of Commerce in Accounting from the University of Calgary. Her research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and her interests include the Hong Kong and Chinese diasporas, popular music, fandom, everyday life, and sound studies.
CHOI, HYE EUN
Hye Eun Choi is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Korean Language and Culture at NYU Shanghai. Before joining NYU Shanghai, she was a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University. Choi has taught courses at Columbia, NYU, and William Paterson University as an adjunct faculty member. Her book project, tentatively titled “Inventing Modern Sound Culture in Colonial Korea (1910-1945),” is a multilayered history that traces the birth of the recording industry in colonial Korea, revealing how a new sound culture was formed not only under Japanese cultural hegemony but also in and through the currents of global modernity.
FAROOQI, AMOS
Amos Farooqi is a PhD Fellow in Korean Studies at the University of Copenhagen. His research project analyzes how localism manifests itself within Korean hip-hop and the effects of disciplining institutions on the development and trajectory of the localized form of the genre. He has previously conducted research and published work on the state of underground hip-hop scenes in provincial localities in Korea, focusing on the effects of cultural deterritorialization on localism in the country. His main research interests are subcultures, localism, and urbanism.
HARKNESS, NICHOLAS
Nicholas Harkness is the Modern Korean Economy and Society Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Korea Institute at Harvard University. His research aims to understand and explain the role of language, communication, conceptualization, and other semiotic processes in the formation and transformation of social groups. Harkness’s ethnographic research in South Korea has focused on language, music, and religion within the context of Korea’s massive engagement with Protestant Christianity in the 20th and 21st Centuries. He is the author of Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea (2014) and Glossolalia and the Problem of Language (2021). Harkness’s scholarship has been recognized by numerous awards, including the Edward Sapir Book Prize from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology and an honorable mention for the Francis L. Hsu Book Prize from the Society for East Asian Anthropology (American Anthropological Association).
HAO, YUCONG
Yucong Hao is a cultural historian of twentieth and twenty-first century China, whose research centers around the role of sound in modern Chinese culture. Working at the intersection of cultural history, sound studies, and performance studies, her scholarship examines how media technologies and cultural techniques of sound shaped novel sensory experiences, enacted political and social change, and created new modes of subjectivity in modern China. She received her PhD in Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Michigan with a certificate in World Performance Studies, and is currently teaching modern Chinese culture and history at New York University Shanghai as a visiting clinical assistant professor.
HSIEH, AMANDA
Amanda Hsieh is Assistant Professor in Musicology at Durham University. Her current monograph project, tentatively titled Opera in the Japanese-German Imagination, 1913–1939, adopts a transnational approach to explore the role post-/Wagnerian German opera played in the shifting cultural-political relations between the two countries. Amanda has published in the Cambridge Opera Journal, Music and Letters, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association. She co-chairs the AMS Global East Asia in Music Research Study Group and co-organises an Asian-German Studies in Music Working Group affiliated with the IMS Global History of Music Study Group. She is the 2020 winner of the RMA’s Jerome Roche Prize.
KRAMER, DEREK J.
Derek Kramer is a historian of science and technology in twentieth century East Asia. He received his degree from the University of Toronto in 2021 and is at present a fellow at the Needham Institute at the University of Cambridge. Derek’s work deals with periodization in science historiography. His ongoing book project deals with the cultural and intellectual amalgamations of the atomic age and the postcolonial era in Cold War North and South Korea. Through an integrated narrative of these two polities, his work emphasizes the role of atomic age in delineating developmentalist futures across the Cold War divide.
LAW, HEDY
Hedy Law is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of British Columbia. She received her Ph.D. in Music Theory and History at the University of Chicago. She has published in Cambridge Opera Journal, the Opera Quarterly, Musique et Geste en France: De Lully à la Révolution, the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, the Oxford Handbook of Music and Censorship, the Oxford Handbook on Music and the Body, and elsewhere. Her book, Music, Pantomime, and Enlightenment France, was published by Boydell & Brewer Press in 2020.
LI, STELLA ZHIZHI
Stella Li is a PhD candidate in Musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She studies the cultural history of music, sound studies, transnationalism, and global modernity, with an emphasis on the everyday soundscape of mid-century Japan. Her research focuses on the multilateral connections between sound making, listening, and the sense of space and time in relation to individuals’ experiences of modernity.
MACBAIN, ABIGAIL I.
Abigail MacBain is a lecturer of pre-modern Japanese history in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her work focuses on early Japan’s overseas relations and Buddhism’s role in transregional communication, cultural development, and global awareness. In particular, she is interested in the circulation of Buddhist texts, ritual implements, and sacred images, as well as the craftsmen, monks, and nuns who helped to transport and promote these items. She is currently working on an article examining the relocations of several Buddhist monks from various parts of the Asian mainland to Japan in the mid-eighth century.
MICHIELSEN, EDWIN
Edwin received his PhD in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto. He is now an assistant professor in modern Japanese literature and culture at the University of Hong Kong. His first book manuscript examines theories and practices of international solidarity found in various proletarian literary writings and cultural activities during the 1920s and 1930s across the Japanese empire. Probing solidarity surrounding May Day, Esperanto, birth control politics, and indigenous and antiwar activism, his study aims to illuminate the transnational networks and intersectional struggles among proletarian cultural movements in East Asia.
MURPHY, ALEX
Alex Murphy is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Kenyon College. His research centers on modern Japan with a focus on the relationship between sound, language, and the body across literature, media and performance. In these settings, he is attentive to how aurality enlivens subject formation and social life in transmedial and border-crossing practice, and how the study of voice and sound can be brought to bear on matters of race, gender, and mobility.
PETRULIS, JASON
Dr. Jason Petrulis is Assistant Professor of History at the Education University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on Asia-US relations, capitalism, race, and empire. His book-in-progress, Wig: A Global History, 1958-1979, uses a curious commodity as a “lens” on Asian industrialization. An article based on this research, “ ‘A Country of Hair’: A Global Story of South Korean Wigs, Korean American Entrepreneurs, African American Hairstyles, and Cold War Industrialization,” won the Scranton “Best Article” prize from the BHC. His conference paper is part of a separate project on the US Navy’s “Perry expedition” to Japan.
RAO, NANCY YUNHWA
Nancy Yunhwa Rao has produced award-winning research on a range of topics, including gender and music, sketch studies, music modernism, cultural fusion in music, racial representations, and the music history of early Chinese Americans. Rao’s book, Chinatown Opera Theater in North America (Illinois University Press, 2017), tells the story of iconic theater companies and the networks and migrations that made Chinese opera a part of North American cultures. It received Music in American Culture Award, American Musicological Society; Lowens Book Award, Society for American Music; and Book Award in Performance and Media, Associations for Asian American Studies. As a music theorist, Rao has explored intersections between China and the West, particularly global perspectives in contemporary Chinese music. Her study on Ruth Crawford won the award of best article in American music published in 2007 from the Society for American Music. She is currently the editor of American Music.
SON, MINGYEONG
Mingyeong Son, as the recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard University Department of Music. She received her Ph.D. in Musicology from Seoul National University (SNU), South Korea in 2021 with her dissertation “Western Composers’ Encounter with Korean Traditional Music: With a Focus on Compositional Aspects and Musical Aesthetics in the Global Era.” She holds a master’s degree in Musicology from Northwestern University. Mingyeong’s research interest lies in Contemporary Music History in the Global Era, Western composers’ reception of East Asian music and its musical aesthetics, and intercultural collaborations between US-Korean musicians.
XIA, JING
Jing Xia is an ethnomusicologist and professional zheng artist based in Newfoundland, Canada. Her research focuses on the diasporic experience of professional Chinese instrumentalists and their intercultural and transnational music-making in North America. Xia is an Artist Research at the Currently Arts Society in Canada and the secretary of the Improvisation Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Xia’s academic works have been published in MUSICultures, Cultural Study, and Music Space. As a musician, Xia’s debut zheng CD, The Numinous Journey, earned her the 2022 MusicNL Rising Star Award and two nominations for the 2023 East Coast Music Awards in Canada.