Education

  • Ph.D., Indiana University, 1988.

Research Interests

  • East Asian music and folklore
  • Chinese culture
  • Ethnicity, nationalism, and tourism

Courses Recently Taught

  • FOLK F111, Introduction to World Music and Culture
  • FOLK F251, Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology
  • FOLK F252, Chinese Film Music
  • FOLK F523, Fieldwork in Folklore and Ethnomusicology
  • FOLK F600, East Asian Music and Culture

Awards and Distinctions

  • IU Trustees Teaching Award, 2001
  • IU Teaching Excellence Recognition Award, 1997
  • IU-Nankai University Faculty Exchange Research Fellowship, 1995
  • Travel Grant, National Endowment for the Humanities, for research in China, 1993

Publication Highlights

  • "Keywords, Theories, and Debates: A Course on Popular Music Studies." Journal of Popular Music Studies 9-10 (1997-1998; published 2000): 276-92.
  • "The Sonic Dimensions of Nationalism in Modern China: Musical Representation and Transformation." (i)Ethnomusicology 45, no. 1 (2001, released 2000): 107-31.
  • "Meteropolitan Sound: Chinese Film Music of the 1930s." In Romance, Sexuality, Politics: Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 200-21.
  • "Current Bibliography in Chinese Music," ACMR Reports 9, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 53-80; 9, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 53-67; 10, no. 1 (1997):50-62; 11, no. 1 (1998): 117-31; 12 (1999):157-83; 13 (2000/in press)
  • Co-Editor (with Jeffrey Wasserstrom). Indiana East Asisan Working Papers Series on Language and Politics in Modern China (1993-1997).

While trained in East Asian studies generally, my own research focuses on Chinese culture and on the ways in which musical performance, discousre, and institutions articulate, and articulate with, central issues in contemporary China. Among the theoretical issues I address through the study of expressive culture are processes of social transformation such as nationalism an dother forms of human affiliation as well as scholarly and political discourse. My approach relies on data gained through first-hand field research but extends to a wide range of media in which the performing arts plan a central role, including mass-mediated electronic forms such as television and video; print discourse such as scholarship and political writing; and live mass forms such as social- political movements and tourism. Focusing particularly on post 1978 China, I have also attended to similar processes found throughout the twentieth century such as social and political mobilization through film and music in teh 1920s-1940s. In my study of Chinese society, I not only have relied extensively on the Chinese-language scholarship as secondary sources but also have analyzed that literature as a form of cultural discouse that has had consequences for the organization and conduct of social life in the Peoples Republic of China.See also the website for the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology.