Teaching and scholarship

(For private music instruction, please see "performance and piano teaching" in my bio.)

Professor Nancy Guy asked me one day, "what makes you study a PhD"? And I answered, "I study because I want to teach." To me, research complements teaching.

Years of leading humanities and music discussion sections, reading, writing, thinking, and performing made me a teacher and conversant who is effective yet sensitive. In teaching, I treat students' often diverse backgrounds and experience as assets in understanding the subject matters at hand, and modify my teaching plans for the students as I see fit.

Courses Taught as instructor

• Music Appreciation (Western Classical Music)
• Topics in Music of the Classic, Romantic, and Modern Periods:
  Music and the Theatrical Mask (upper-level undergraduate seminar)
• Popular Music: Identities and Politics of Hong Kong (undergrad lecture class)
• Popular Music: Chinese Pop and Culture (undergrad lecture class)

discussion sections taught
as teaching assistant

• History of Western Music (3-quarter sequence for music majors)
• Music of Multicultural America
• Japanese Pop Music
• Revelle Humanities Writing Program
  • The Foundations of Western Civilization: Israel and Greece
  • Rome, Christianity, and the Middle Ages
  • Renaissance, Reformation, and Early Modern Europe
  • taught special sections for students with basic writing needs. Most students were minorities and international students in these sections.

Teaching Interests

• Music, Sound Studies, and Disability Studies
• Music Fundamentals, Music Theory, and Aural Training
• Intercultural Musical Practices (different designs as a seminar for music majors and a lecture course for general education)
• Challenges of Modernity: Operas (as a liberal arts humanities course)
• History of Western Music/ Music Literature
• American Music

Scholarship

·         (In progress) "Music and Social Politics of Pierrot, 1880-1915," PhD dissertation, University of California, San Diego

·         (In preparation) “Unpolitical Memory, Political Forgetfulness: Contesting Nationhoods in the Music of Postcolonial Hong Kong”

·       (In preparation) “Listening Through the Disabled Body: One-handed Pianist Paul Wittgenstein and Musical Modernism”

·        “The Soundtrack of China’s Youth: Super, Girls!” (review article, 2013)
dGenerate Films, online.

International Musicological Society Congress
Tokyo, Japan (forthcoming)

·       presenting the paper “Derivative Music as Response to Political Apathy in Hong Kong” (March 2017)
 

Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting, Austin, Texas, and
Eureka! Musical Minds of California Conference, University of California, Santa Cruz

·       presented the paper “Unpolitical Memory, Political Forgetfulness: Three Postcolonial Discourses in the Music of Hong Kong” (2015)
 

American Musicological Society Pacific Southwest Chapter Meeting
San Diego State University

·       presented the paper “Listening Through the Disabled Body: One-handed Pianist Paul Wittgensteinand Musical Modernism” (2015)

Society for Ethnomusicology Southern California and Hawaii Chapter Meeting
University of California, Riverside

·       presented the paper “Chinese Non-Identified: Overseas Students and Chinese Popular Music” (2013)

Interdisciplinary Arts Graduate Student Conference
Ohio University, Athens

·       presented the paper “Musical Programming, Physical Space, and Symbolic Meaning: Confronting Monarchy and Democracy in the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremonies” (2012)