Chun-bin Chen (Ph.D. '07) Visits Music Department as Senior Fulbright Fellow

Chun-bin Chen is Associate Professor of Musicology at Taipei National University of the Arts, Taiwan. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 2007. His research interests include music and identity, music and indigenous modernity, folk and popular music, and Taiwanese music. He has published several articles and books on Taiwanese Indigenous music, including Listening to Taiwanese Aboriginal Music in the Post-modern Era: Media Culture, the Poetics/the Politics, and Cultural Meanings (2013, in Chinese) and On the Road to the National Concert Hall: Highway Nine Musical Stories (2020, in Chinese). He is currently conducting a project titled “Sound Alliances: A Comparative Study on Musical Modernity Among Indigenous Peoples of North America and Taiwan” which is sponsored by Fulbright Program (the United States) and Ministry of Science and Technology (Taiwan)

This project aims at connecting Taiwanese Aboriginal music study with Native American music study, by means of reviewing literature on Native American music study, discussing my project with American scholars, and visiting institutions for Indigenous study and attending Indigenous performances. By examining parallels between Taiwanese Aboriginal music study and Native American study, I consider: what makes Indigenous musics “indigenous?” I argue that to study Indigenous music in the modern world, we need to look back and forth between indigeneity and modernity, and thus such a study may help us gain a deeper understanding of indigeneity through examining modernity, and vice versa.