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I am a musicologist, lecturer, pianist, and music critic currently pursuing my Ph.D. 
degree in musicology at Harvard University. As a music and cultural historian, my research interests, evolving from my dissertation, center on the relationship between media, cultural mobility, and the performance of race and identity in 20th and 21st-century music. Examining the intricacies of this relationship is pertinent in understanding how empire and anti-colonial thought are embodied in opera and musical theater. I excavate transcultural and transmedial networks between North America, Asia, and Australasia to show how the global circulation of non-European music and ideas perpetuates Western imagination of the Other. This is investigated alongside the flourishing of vernacular adaptations and translations, which challenges colonial ideologies. Moreover, in light of decolonial reckoning in our global artistic institutions, this work invites a consideration of what it means for music to move beyond Western frameworks to embrace historically underrepresented perspectives.
My dissertation, The Hypermobility Turn: Opera of The Future, The Future of Opera, was awarded two prizes from the American Musicological Society (AMS), supported by the Holmes/D’Accone Dissertation Fellowship from the AMS, the Virgil Thomson Fellowship from the Society for American Music, the Victor and William Fung Fellowship, and was honored as a finalist for the Harvard Horizons Scholars program. It draws on opera, mobility, media, East Asian, and Indigenous studies alongside ethnographic research and interviews. I coined the term hypermobility turn to examine how decolonial thinking and the pandemic ushered in seismic shifts in the global arts ecosystem, as seen in operas predicated on breaking barriers and conventions, but far beyond more conventional strategies of unsettling. The contours of this emergent hypermobility turn are investigated through a global microhistory of four operas produced by a constellation of Asian, Black, and Indigenous creatives who envision decolonial futures while raising larger questions about the representation of non-Western cultures and aesthetics in storytelling, the ideological role of alternative sites in constructing the racial and gendered imaginary, how transmedia storytelling imagines subjectivities anew, and whether decolonization can drive social transformations. I argue that their simultaneous embrace and challenge of the decolonial framework provokes new reflections on how to gain access to marginalized epistemologies.
My publications range from opera to dramaturgy, Asian diasporic composers, cultural mobility, decolonial thinking, film music, and transmedia storytelling. They appear in CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral & Performing Literature, Sound Stage Screen, The Theatre Times, The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema, and is forthcoming in Jazz and Culture. I have presented my research at the AMS (2019, 21, 22, 24), SEM (2019), SAM (2020, 22, 24), IMS (2022), MaMI (2020), and TOSC@Lisbon (2023), and given guest lectures at the University of Chicago, the University of Milan, and the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. My CHINOPERL article examines the cultural mobility of Asian-American composers by focusing on the transnational success of Bright Sheng’s Dream of the Red Chamber in San Francisco, Hong Kong, and China. My Sound Stage Screen article scrutinizes the staging of race and gender in urban reimaginations of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung in Detroit and Chicago. This work grows out of many ideas developed in my edited volume, New Dramaturgies of Contemporary Opera: The Practitioners’ Perspectives, published by Routledge in September 2024. It is the first book that approaches contemporary opera and music theater from the unique perspectives of living practitioners, particularly focusing on the voices and repertoire of historically marginalized artists and performers. Written in collaboration with composers, librettists, directors, producers, singers, dramaturgs, and administrators, it offers insight into the genesis of operas in a global context.
My classroom teaching draws on my extensive research and performance background, and my training in music history, theory, ethnomusicology, and music pedagogy. I have dual degrees in piano performance and musicology from two major conservatories, Oberlin Conservatory and Indiana University. My chief aim as a pedagogue—shaped by experience teaching in universities and colleges both in the US and abroad—is to help students become better listeners in our global world today, and to encourage them to think with a clear head about music and music-making. I have designed and taught multiple seminars for a wide range of undergraduate and graduate students with varying levels of music knowledge and diverse cultural backgrounds, and have received many teaching awards and certificates such as the Carol Nott Pedagogy Prize (2015), the Mini-Course Award Grant (2021), the Bok Center Certificate of Distinction in Teaching (2020, 22, 24), and the Bok Center Teaching Certificate (2021). Couses taught include the “Music in Multimedia Art” seminar for Harvard music concentrators and “20th and 21st-Century Contemporary Opera.” From 2018 to 2021, I was an invited lecturer to Indiana University and SUSTech to teach the survey course “Western Music History 101,” and more specialized topics like “Music of the Silk Road” and “Cultural Fusion and Musical Cosmopolitanism.” Previously at Oberlin Conservatory, I was a music history course tutor for the Introduction of Western Music History survey course, and was also a piano teacher of the secondary piano program.
Alongside research and teaching, I actively pursue mentorship, service, and outreach aimed at diversity, equity, and the elevation of marginalized voices. Having been an undergraduate research advisor, served on the AMS Committee on Race, Indigeneity, and Ethnicity, directed the World Music Ensemble, and served as the Conference Chair of the Graduate Music Forum, I am committed to breaking down perceived barriers associated with musical knowledge and performance, and supporting historically underrepresented students. I particularly look forward to mentoring students who work on transpacific, Asian and Asian diasporic, opera, multimedia, multilingual, anti-colonial, and digital humanities topics.
You can reach me at jingyizhang at g dot harvard dot edu (jingyizhang@g.harvard.edu) or zjingyi93 at yahoo dot com dot sg (zjingyi93@yahoo.com.sg)