Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit is PhD Candidate in Musicology at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation, “Sounding Civilization: Race and Sovereignty in the Imperial Music of Siam, 1870-1910,” examines the localization of European music and sound practices at the Siamese court as a means of negotiating new conceptions of sovereign personhood in colonial survival.
Parkorn’s research has been supported by the Paul A. Pisk Prize, the Harold Powers Grant, the Alvin Johnson AMS 50 Fellowship, the Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship, and the Holmes/D’Accone Fellowship of the American Musicological Society. His work has also been awarded the Historical Ethnomusicology Prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the Transnational Opera Studies Conference (Tosc@) Junior Scholar Award.
Parkorn’s articles appear in Cambridge Opera Journal and The Opera Quarterly.