Winnie W. C. Lai

|Research Associate
Academic Appointments
  • Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (2024-2026)

  • Research Associate B

  • Lecturer

I am a(n) (ethno)musicology and sound scholar and returning singer-songwriter working as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music (2024–2026) at Dartmouth. My scholarly work crosses disciplinary and methodological boundaries by integrating ethnographic materials with historical archives and employing dynamic intermedial methods. Broadly speaking, I avidly ruminate on the theoretical and phenomenological entanglement of sound, auralities, and power to grapple with issues about why sound matters and how the sonic/listening being lives in situations of the everyday. At Dartmouth, I am developing my first monograph, which expands the scope of my hybrid-mode dissertation, "Sounding Freedom: Political Aurality and Sound Acts in Hong Kong (Post-)Protest Spaces," to study the dynamics of sound in Hong Kong's urban spaces where protests happened and now disappeared, and the sonic and affective currents circulating through the Hong Kong diaspora and transnational protests in North America and beyond. My doctoral studies in Music at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) as a Benjamin Franklin Fellow (2018–2022, 2023–2024), Tarnopol Graduate Fellow (2020–2021), and Price Lab Andrew W. Mellon Mid-Doctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities (2022–2023) led to methodological experiments with intermedialities and field materials to craft spaces for sensory experience to create ethnographies and historical archives. I also study performed vocalities in singing and everyday living and the acoustemological mode of listening, particularly in Asian cultures and the Sinophone world. I gratefully received the James T. Koetting Prize (2024), SEM 21st Century Fellowship (2023), Penfield Research Award (2022), Charles Seeger Prize (Honorable Mention in 2021), and Rayson Huang Scholarship in Music (2017). I gained a Graduate Certificate in Experimental Ethnography and a Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities from Penn.

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Contact

Sudikoff Hall, Room 106
HB 6187

Education

  • B.A. (Hons) University of Hong Kong (Music) (2013)
  • M.Phil. University of Hong Kong (Musicology) (2017)
  • Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania (Music - Ethnomusicology) (2024)

Selected Publications

  • "Sounding Freedom: Political Aurality and Sound Acts in Hong Kong (Post-)Protest Spaces." PhD. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2024. (Awarded the SEM 21st Century Fellowship 2023, The Society for Ethnomusicology.)

    "'Happy Birthday to You': Music as Nonviolent Weapon in the Umbrella Movement." Hong Kong Studies 1, no. 1 (March, 2018): 66-82. (Shortlisted as one of the eight finalist works for the IBP Best Article on Global Hong Kong Studies in Humanities 2021.)