William Cheng
Associate Professor of MusicActing Chair 19F Music
As an Associate Professor of Music at Dartmouth College, I conduct research and teach varied courses in history, media, ethics, disability, race, and digital games. I received a B.A. in Music and English from Stanford University in 2007, and a Ph.D. in Musicology from Harvard University in 2013. Between 2012–16, I was a Junior Fellow with the Harvard Society of Fellows. During Fall 2019, I will serve as Acting Chair of Dartmouth’s Department of Music.
I'm a founding coeditor of University of Michigan Press’s Music & Social Justice series. In addition to books and academic articles, I have written op-eds and features for publications such as Washington Post, Slate, TIME, Huffington Post, and Pacific Standard. I serve on the Council of the American Musicological Society and 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.
In past years, I've enjoyed giving classical piano recitals featuring improvisations on themes from the audience.
Selected Publications
SINGLE-AUTHORED BOOKS
Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2014). Foreword by Richard Leppert
Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (University of Michigan Press, 2016). Foreword by Susan McClary.
Loving Music Till It Hurts (Oxford University Press, 2019)
EDITED VOLUMES
Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology (Oxford University Press, ed. with Greg Barz, 2019)
A Cultural History of Music in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury Academic, ed. with Danielle Fosler-Lussier)
ARTICLES
Visit www.willxcheng.com