Please join us on Friday, December 6 at 3pm (Dodge 622) for a talk from Prof. Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit (Washington University in Saint Louis). The presentation is titled: “Tuning to Colonial Approval: Anxieties for Musical Knowledge Production in Siam.”
Dr. Wangpaiboonkit’s research focuses on music, race, and imperialism in nineteenth-century Siam. He is interested in issues of aesthetic commensurability in colonial encounter, comparativism and the production of knowledge about non-European musics, and opera as a racializing global-colonial form. His book project, Race and Sovereignty in the Imperial Music of Siam, 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.
Dr. Wangpaiboonkit’s work has been generously recognized by the American Musicological Society with the Alfred Einstein Award (2023), the Paul A. Pisk Prize (2021), and the Harold Powers Award (2021). He has also received all three fellowships offered by the AMS: the Holmes / D’Accone Fellowship (2022), the Alvin Johnson AMS50 Fellowship (2021), and the Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship (2020). As a recipient of the ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, Dr. Wangpaiboonkit is spending the 2024-25 academic year as an ACLS-CHCI Visiting Scholar at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University.
