Ph.D. & M.A., Harvard University; M.A. & M.M., Indiana University Bloomington; B.M. Oberlin Conservatory

Jingyi Zhang is a musicologist specializing in global opera, music theater, and transcultural exchanges across the Pacific Rim. She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Harvard University (2025), as well as degrees from Oberlin Conservatory (B.M.) and Indiana University (M.A. and M.M.), both in musicology and piano performance. Her research examines how racial identity, mobility, media technology, and mutilingualism shape music and theater from the 19th century to the present, with a focus on the U.S., China, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. Currently, she is developing a book project that constructs a new cultural history of operetta by charting its transpacific networks, revealing how this global genre intersects with larger debates on music's relationship with language, local histories, mass-media, and (post-)colonial legacies.

Zhang's award-winning dissertation, The Hypermobility Turn: Opera of The Future, The Future of Opera, received two prizes from the American Musicological Society (AMS) and was supported by the Holmes/D'Accone Dissertation Fellowship from the AMS, the Virgil Thomson Fellowship from the Society for American Music, and Harvard's Victor and William Fung Fellowship. Selected as a Harvard Horizons Scholar finalist, the project proposes the hypermobility turn as a critical framework for decolonial practices in contemporary opera and music theater.

Her interdisciplinary scholarship spans opera, film music, Asian diasporic composers, and transmedia storytelling, with publications in CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral & Performing Literature, Sound Stage Screen, The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema, The Theatre Times, and Jazz and Culture. Zhang is the editor of New Dramaturgies of Contemporary Opera: The Practitioners' Perspectives (Routledge, 2025), the first volume to center living practitioners—particularly marginalized voices—in discussions of contemporary opera. The book furnishes critcal insight into new media, multilingualism, and the representation of non-Western cultures in the contemporary operatic ecology. She has presented at major conferences (AMS, SEM, SAM, IMS) and delivered invited lectures at institutions such as the University of Chicago, the University of Milan, and the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. 

As an educator, Zhang has taught at Oberlin College and Harvard University, earning the Carol Nott Pedogagy Prize, the Bok Center Teaching Certificate, and multiple Certificates of Distinction in Teaching. Her teaching bridges interdisciplinary boundaries between music history, media studies, and Asian diasporic studies, as well as traditional divides between history and creative practice. Committed to equity in the arts, she has mentored undergraduates, directed Harvard's World Music Ensemble, and served on the AMS Committee on Race, Indigeneity, and Ethnicity.