William Cheng is Chair and Professor of Music at Dartmouth College, where he holds the Eunice and Julian Cohen Professorship for the Study of Ethics and Human Values. He is affiliate faculty with the Department of African and African American Studies, the Department of Film and Media Studies, and the Program in Comparative Literature.
An avid gamer and lifelong pianist-improviser, Cheng work at the intersections of cultural histories, disability studies, media theories, care ethics, racial justice, and queerness. He received a B.A. in Music (Piano Performance) and English (Creative Writing) from Stanford University in 2007, and a Ph.D. in Musicology from Harvard University in 2013.
His books include Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2014), Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (University of Michigan Press, 2016), Loving Music Till It Hurts (Oxford, 2019), Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology (Oxford 2019, coedited with Gregory Barz), and A Cultural History of Western Music in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023, coedited with Danielle Fosler-Lussier). He has contributed op-eds and features to Washington Post, Slate, TIME, Huffington Post, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Pacific Standard (archived here).
Cheng is a founding coeditor (with Andrew Dell'Antonio) of University of Michigan Press's Music & Social Justice Series; an elected representative for the American Musicological Society's Ethics Committee (2021–24); and a past Board Member of JAG Productions, an incubator for theater and community formation. He serves on the boards of Journal of the Society for American Music, Music & the Moving Image, Women & Music, Ethnomusicology Review, Sound Studies, and Journal of Videogame Sound and Music. At Dartmouth College, he serves on the Committee on Priorities and the Committee Advisory to the Dean.
He is the recipient of a 2024 Senior Faculty Grant (Dartmouth), 2023 Scholarly Innovation and Advancement Grant (Dartmouth), 2022–23 Radcliffe Fellowship (Harvard Radcliffe Institute), 2020 Jerome Goldstein Distinguished Teaching Award (Dartmouth), 2020 Irving Lowens Article Award (Society for American Music), 2020 Marcia Herndon Book Award (Society for Ethnomusicology), 2019 Richard Waterman Prize (Society for Ethnomusicology), 2018 Wetterhahn Memorial Award for Distinguished Creative or Scholarly Achievement (Dartmouth), 2017 Enhanced Junior Faculty Fellowship (Dartmouth), 2016 Philip Brett Award (American Musicological Society), 2014–15 Public Voices Fellowship (Op-Ed Project), 2014 William F. Milton Fund (Harvard), 2013 AMS 75 PAYS Subvention (American Musicological Society), 2011 Philip Brett Award (American Musicological Society), 2010 Mark Tucker Award (Society for American Music), and 2010 Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship (American Musicological Society). He was a Junior Fellow with the Harvard Society of Fellows between 2012 and 2016.