Faculty

Chris Batterman Cháirez

I am an ethnographer and anthropologist of music from Mexico City. My work deals with the intercalations of music, difference, and power in Latin America and, broadly speaking, with the politics of sound. I think about the ways music reveals latent registers of feeling, sense, and history; and sound’s intersections with media and technology, law and governance, movement and migration, faith and cosmology, and other dimensions of social life. My long-term ethnographic research commitments are in Michoacán, Mexico. I also work in Mexico City and in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

My first...

Mu-Xuan Lin

Composer (/curator/writer/researcher) Mu-Xuan Lin (林慕萱) (b.1984, Taiwan/USA) defines her life as a quest for an artistic autonomy poetically engendered by both its will and its vulnerability to one’s corporeal experience and to the world one lives in. Having extensive training in the visual arts and creative writing and frequent exposure to theatre, dance, and literature from an early age, and profound influences from the cinema, Mu-Xuan is interested in the montage and the mise-en-scène of contemporary individuals’ fragmented yet interlaced truths, of the confusion of time and place, and...

Marié Abe

I am a scholar of music and sound with ongoing ethnographic commitments in Japan, Okinawa, Ethiopia, and the US. Broadly speaking, my research explores the political and affective affordances of (musical) sounds in contexts ranging from everyday life to social movements, primarily in contemporary Japan. My scholarship is driven by my interest in exploring how auditory culture produces social space, and how sound’s materiality and ephemerality are entangled with affect and sociality. In other words, I investigate how the culturally particular ways in which people listen to and make (musical...

Ken Ueno

A recipient of the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, Ken Ueno, is a composer, vocalist, improviser, sound artist, and scholar.

Ueno's music celebrates artistic possibilities which are liberated through a Whitmanesque consideration of the embodied practice of unique musical personalities. Much of Ueno’s music is “person-specific” wherein the intricacies of performance practice is brought into focus in the technical achievements of a specific individual fused, inextricably, with that performer’s aura. His artistic mission is to champion sounds that have been overlooked or denied so...

Matthew Evan Taylor

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Dr. Matthew Evan Taylor (1980) has been hailed as a “risk taker” (Neil De La Flor, Huffington Post), who has “…wrestled with the societal boundaries of Black artistry only to blast them apart…” (Dr. Kori Hill, I Care if You Listen) by making music that is “insistent and defiant…envelopingly hypnotic” (Alan Young, Lucid Culture). His work includes concert music, such as okussa: for Damascus (2023, commissioned by the Next Festival for Emerging Artists)...

Lester Hu

A historian of music and music theory, I focus my research on music and state-building—empire-building, to be more specific. Empires are by default players and products of transregional processes encompassing diverse peoples, territories, and traditions. Hence the other throughline of my work: a comparative perspective, informed by my current expertise in early modern Europe and late-imperial China (16th to 18th centuries) and by my new pivot to ancient and early imperial China (8...

Faculty