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. Trained in both musicology and piano performance at Oberlin Conservatory and Indiana University, she completed her Ph.D. in musicology at Harvard University in 2025. She studied piano with Ong Lip Tat, Monique Duphil, and Evelyne Brancart. Her research examines how racial identity, mobility, media technology, and multilingualism shape music and theater from the nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on the U.S., China, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. Her monograph in progress, Operetta in Transpacific Perspectives, constructs a new cultural history of operetta by charting the genre’s transpacific networks, revealing how a global form intersects with larger debates on music’s relationship to language, local histories, mass media, and (post-)colonial legacies. A second project turns to playback and to the empire, desire, and misrecognition that travel with sounding machines. Articles in progress examine the jukeboxes that sound the longing and violence of Hong Kong crime cinema, and a nineteenth-century music box whose name and silence tell a different story. 

Her award-winning dissertation, “The Hypermobility Turn: Opera of The Future, The Future of Opera”, proposes the hypermobility turn as a critical framework for decolonial practice in contemporary opera and music theater. It received two prizes from the American Musicological Society (AMS) and was supported by the AMS Holmes/D’Accone Dissertation Fellowship, the Virgil Thomson Fellowship from the Society for American Music, and Harvard’s Victor and William Fung Fellowship. Zhang was named a finalist for Harvard Horizons and the Three Minute Thesis competition. 

Her interdisciplinary scholarship spans opera, film music, transmedia storytelling, and the work of Asian diasporic composers, 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. She 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 opens onto questions of new media, multilingualism, and the representation of non-Western cultures in the contemporary operatic ecology. Zhang has presented at major conferences (AMS, SEM, SAM, IMS) and lectured by invitation at the University of Chicago and the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, with National Taiwan University forthcoming. She also serves as managing editor of the opera section of The Theatre Times.  

As an educator, Zhang teaches music history, global opera, and research methods at James Madison University, and has previously taught at Harvard University, Indiana University, and Oberlin College. Her teaching bridges music history, media studies, and Asian diasporic studies, as well as the traditional divide between historical scholarship and creative practice, and has been recognized with the Carol Nott Pedagogy Prize, the Bok Center Teaching Certificate, and multiple Certificates of Distinction in Teaching. Committed to equity in the arts, she advises doctoral and undergraduate research at JMU, has published an open-access syllabus through VIVA Open, previously directed Harvard’s World Music Ensemble, and serves on the AMS Committee on Race, Indigeneity, and Ethnicity.