Jingyi Zhang

Jingyi Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Harvard University. As a music and cultural historian, her research interests center on themes of racial identity, mobility, media technology, and decolonial thinking in 19th to 21st century songs, opera, and theater. Her first monograph, The Hypermobility Turn in Contemporary Opera and Music Theater, builds on her doctoral research, which was awarded two prizes from the American Musicological Society (AMS), the Holmes/D’Accone Dissertation Fellowship from the AMS, the Virgil Thomson Fellowship from the Society for American Music, the Victor and William Fung Fellowship, and honored as a finalist for the Harvard Horizons Scholars program. Her publications ranging from opera and dramaturgy to cultural mobility, decolonial thinking in the arts, social activism, Asian diasporic composers, and film music have appeared in CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral & Performing Literature, Sound Stage Screen, The Theatre Times, The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema, and is forthcoming in Jazz and Culture. In addition, she published an edited volume, New Dramaturgies of Contemporary Opera: The Practitioners’ Perspectives, with Routledge in September 2024, which to date is the first and only book approaching contemporary opera from the unique perspectives of living practitioners (composers, librettists, directors, producers, singers, dramaturgs, administrators) who provide first-hand insight into the coming into being of an opera in the global context.