Winnie W. C. Lai

My doctoral studies in Music at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) as a Benjamin Franklin Fellow (2018–2022, 2023–2024), Tarnopol Graduate Fellow (2020–2021), and Price Lab Andrew W. Mellon Mid-Doctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities (2022–2023) led to methodological experiments with intermedialities and field materials to craft spaces for sensory experience to create ethnographies and historical archives. I also study performed vocalities in singing and everyday living and the acoustemological mode of listening, particularly in Asian cultures and the Sinophone world. I gratefully received the James T. Koetting Prize (2024), SEM 21st Century Fellowship (2023), Penfield Research Award (2022), Charles Seeger Prize (Honorable Mention in 2021), and Rayson Huang Scholarship in Music (2017). I gained a Graduate Certificate in Experimental Ethnography and a Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities from Penn. I am currently serving as the co-chair of the Sound Studies Section at the Society for Ethnomusicology (October 2024 to November 2026).

As a global citizen and a young intellect focusing on sonic contestation, I maintain one belief: music and (ethno)musicology come with a social obligation. Being born and raised in Hong Kong, my city's 2014 Umbrella Movement was a turning point that reoriented my life from becoming a fledgling singer-songwriter (winner of the Best Music Video Award from Sony Music Entertainment Hong Kong in 2013) to a junior music/sound scholar working on protest sounds. I graduated from an M.Phil. in musicology at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) with a thesis entitled "Sound and Nonviolence: Music as Political Action in Hong Kong" (2017). That metamorphosis has evolved into my academic and personal mission—to be a candid sound scholar and being. In addition to my ongoing intermedial productions and research on power dynamics in (un)sounding social spheres, I am rebuilding my interests as a scholar/performer, concentrating on Sinophone/East Asian R&B and pop music and Cantopop.

Since 2014, as a teaching assistant at HKU and subsequently an instructor in music at Penn, I have taught courses ranging from global popular music to Common Core courses covering multiple musical topics for classes composed primarily of non-music majors. I was a guest speaker for a multimodal workshop at Penn's Law School (2021), a Cantopop class at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2023), and a lecture in Professor William Cheng's course, Music and Social Justice, at Dartmouth (October 2024). I will be teaching a course in the second year of the postdoctoral fellowship.