Fields

European opera since 1750; film and film music; video aesthetics; popular music studies; Asian American poetics and theory; affect theory; critical theories of gender, sexuality, and race.

Profile

Broadly speaking, my work focuses on audiovisual aesthetics in stage and screen mediums since the eighteenth century. I often focus on formal details that show up in art works and the language and culture that surrounds them, and then try to think about how these forms might relate to what it is possible to think, feel, and imagine in a given time and place.

My first book, Lyric Personhood: On the Aesthetics of Being Someone in the West (University of Chicago Press, 2025), investigates the idea that many of us seem to have an innate and instinctive sense of what it means to be a person. It argues that we learn what personhood should feel like through encounters with audiovisual form, and not only from legal, moral, political, or philosophical argument. Each chapter centers on a different concept that has become central to the modern imagination of personhood—the voice, romantic love, the idea of "healing" in a therapeutic sense, and the affective experience of citizen-belonging—and shows how one can trace the development of each idea in the audiovisual infrastructures of opera, cinema, and video.

I’m currently at work on two new projects. The first, tentatively titled Attentional Forms, tells a history of attention that emerges from the juncture of philosophy, medicine, and musical formalism. I'm interested in the fact that attention—a concept that unites sensory focus with time—has become a key normative value of the cultural present, in the sense that it is often described as both the symptom and the cure for a range of structural and ordinary problems. But attention remains relatively undertheorized in musical aesthetics, and many scientific and vernacular accounts of attention tend to picture it as an internal capacity that can simply be directed toward any number of external objects. In such accounts, the composition and form of the object itself (especially if it's an aesthetic object), tends to become irrelevant. The first study toward this book focuses on the Philadelphia-based rapper Tierra Whack’s 2018 album Whack World, which consists of fifteen one-minute songs. While several critics referred to the songs as incomplete, I see them as participating in a mode of contemporary cultural production about completeness. In this sense, the work engages and extends the modernist fragment and the postmodern pastiche as twentieth-century forms that aimed to incorporate the experience and concept of attention into the formal boundary of the work.

A second project centers on what I am provisionally calling "aesthetics after the era of diversity," and most explicitly continues the interest in Western audiovisual cultures that began with Lyric Personhood. Where my first book explored the significance of personhood in the West, its sequel focuses instead on styles, gestures, and other tactics of musical performance that decline to produce a coherent racial, sexual, gendered, or otherwise culturally marked "identity" within the taxonomic recognitions of the state. An early study in this project, "(-_-) [What is an Asian American Style?]," focuses on experimental racial pop musical performance and appeared in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect.

At Pitt, I'm an affiliated faculty member with Film & Media Studies and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies program, and I have taught courses covering topics in Western art music, film and audiovisual media, genre studies, gender and sexuality, affect theory, and many other areas. I am also a co-editor of Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, and am always looking for new work on music and sound that engages gender and sexuality theory in interesting ways. If you have a piece that you think might be suitable for the journal, I’m always happy to receive e-mail inquiries.

Current and Upcoming Courses

Time and Attention

Slow Apocalypse

The Politics and Aesthetics of Time

Sonic Liberalisms

Media Theory for the 21st Century

Sounds of Romantic Comedy

Theories of Gender and Music

Publications

2025 Lyric Personhood: On the Aesthetics of Being Someone in the West. University of Chicago Press.

2025 "Complaint and the Aesthetics of Inexpression." The Opera Quarterly, 40.

2024 "Reversed Images." Music Theory in the Plural. Special issue edited by Anna Yu Wang, Edwin Li, and Chris Stover. Music Theory Online 30, no. 3.

2022 "(-_-) [What is an Asian American Style?]." The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect, edited by Todd W. Reeser.

2019 "The Voice of Feeling: Liberal Subjects, Music, and the Cinematic Speech." Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, edited by Nina Sun Eidsheim and Katherine L. Meizel.

2012 "Melodrama, Two Ways." 19th-Century Music 36 No. 2 (Fall), p. 122-35.

Talks

2025 “Attentional Form: Mediacy, ADHD, and Tierra Whack’s Whack World." Theorizing Trauma and Disability in the Arts and Music. UCLA, October 16-19.

2023 “What’s the Most Asian Disney Movie? (Wrong Answers Only)." Association of Asian American Studies Annual Conference. Long Beach, April 6-9.

2021 "The Stage Anti-Presence of Orono Noguchi." American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference. Chicago, April 9-11.

2020 “Film Music in the Time of Terrorism." American Musicological Society Annual Conference. Online, November 7-8.

2020 “Diversity, Depression, Institutions." Diversifying Music Academia: Building the Coalition. Project Spectrum, October 11.

2019 "There's No 'I' in Feel: Non-Stop, the NRA, and the Democratic Imaginary." American Studies Association Annual Conference. Honolulu, November 7-10.

2018 “What is an Asian American Style? Superorganism in the Assimilated Public." Music of Asian America: History, Activism, and Collaborations. University of Pennsylvania, November 9-11.

2018 “The Timing of Liberal Political Fantasy (Some Textures from Opera and Film)." American Musicological Society Annual Conference. San Antonio, November 1-4.

2018 “The Erotics of Fictional Worlds." Opera Through the Eyes of Film. Neubauer Collegium. Chicago, May 9-10.

2017 “Yellowdrama: Traumatic Identity and the Model Melodramatist" (with Woo Chan Lee). Trauma & Melodrama: Emotions in the Public Sphere. University of Chicago, April 21-22.

2016 Panel organizer and co-chair, “Opera and Character" (with Kirsten Paige). 19th Biennial International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music. Oxford University, July 13.

2016 Panel, “On the Subject of Hearing: Audio, Identification, Address." Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference. Atlanta, March 30 – April 3.

2016 “Three Speeches by Colin Firth." EZ Music Conference. University of California, Berkeley, March 11-13