YVONNE LIAO
Yvonne returned to Oxford in 2017, having read Music as an undergraduate at Christ Church (1999–2002) and graduated with first-class honours. In her later funded position as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2017–20) she was also an Early Career Fellow at TORCH (and a member of the TORCH Management Committee, 2019–20), and a Non-Stipendiary Postdoctoral Associate in the Humanities at St Cross College. In the academic year 2020–21 she is a TORCH Research Associate.
Yvonne is a music historian and global historian engaged primarily in the study of colonialism and its effects in the twentieth century, and their implications for scholarly advocacy and intervention in the twenty-first. Her current monograph project, Imperfect Global: Thinking European Music Cultures in Shanghai and Hong Kong, 1897–1997 aims to explore the musicological production of ‘global’ knowledge and its related thought-practices in new ethical terms. Developing in parallel with the monograph is her co-editorship with Erin Johnson-Williams and Roe-Min Kok of The Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism, a forthcoming multi-essay volume; and a second monograph project on the decoloniality of Asian choral societies, postwar power dynamics and neo-imperial politics across the port cities of Singapore, Hong Kong and Yokohama.
Yvonne’s research has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the Royal Musical Association and King’s College London; and in the collaborative interdisciplinary arena, she is a co-recipient of a TORCH Network Grant for Colonial Ports and Global History (CPAGH). With Olivia Bloechl and Gabriel Solis, she is a founding co-organiser of the American Musicological Society’s Global Music History Study Group. With Joe Davis, she is a co-lead of the cross-sectoral network, Women in Music: Global Perspectives.
A keen advocate of musicology as an intersectional collaborative practice in the humanities, Yvonne co-founded in 2018 the interdisciplinary network, CPAGH, with three historians, a social anthropologist and a fellow musicologist. The network’s mission, public engagement and other activities are detailed here: https://torch.ox.ac.uk/cpagh
RESEARCH
Postcolonial music studies and global thought-practices, with a focus on port cities of the twentieth century; critical fresh perspectives on western music history and historiography in post-European settings and contexts; archives and music research
CONTACT
yvonne.liao@humanities.ox.ac.uk
Twitter @yyj_liao
