Winnie W. C. Lai

Winnie W. C. Lai (she/her) is an ethnomusicology and sound scholar and returning singer-songwriter working as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music (2024–2026) at Dartmouth. Her 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 a hybrid-mode dissertation entitled "Sounding Freedom: Political Aurality and Sound Acts in Hong Kong (Post-)Protest Spaces". She avidly ruminates on the theoretical entanglements of (un)sounding matters, auralities, and power. Working across sound studies, political theories, and matters of Hong Kong, she experiments with intermedial methods and field materials to craft spaces for sensory experience. She also studies performed vocalities in singing and everyday living and the acoustemological mode of listening, particularly in Asian cultures and the Sinophone world. She has 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). She has gained a Graduate Certificate in Experimental Ethnography and a Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities from Penn. At Dartmouth, Winnie is developing her doctoral dissertation into a book project, as she expands her listening to the spheres circulating among Hong Kong diaspora and transnational protests.

As a global citizen and a young intellect focusing on sonic contestation, Winnie maintains one belief: music and (ethno)musicology come with a social obligation. Being born and raised in Hong Kong, the city's 2014 Umbrella Movement was a turning point that transformed her from 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. She 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 her academic and personal mission—to be a candid sound scholar and being. In addition to her ongoing intermedial productions and research on power dynamics in (un)sounding social spheres, she is rebuilding her 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, she has taught courses ranging from global popular music and jazz music history and appreciation to Common Core courses covering multiple musical topics for classes composed primarily of non-music majors. She was invited as a guest speaker to a multimodal workshop at Penn's Law School (2021) and a Cantopop class at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2023).