Jingyi Zhang

Jingyi Zhang is a PhD candidate in musicology at Harvard University. Her research focuses on contemporary opera, operatic mobility, voice studies, and critical media studies. She is currently working with Carolyn Abbate and Kate van Orden for her dissertation provisionally titled “Opera of the Future, the Future of Opera: Indie Opera.” In January, she was awarded the Harvard GSC Mini-Course Grant to teach her own course titled "21st Century Contemporary Opera: Affective Storytelling Through Place, Technology, and Memory."

Jingyi has presented at regional, national, and international musicology conferences including AMS chapter conferences, AMS Boston 2019, SEM 2019, SAM 2020, and the 22nd CHIME meeting. Her 2019 paper “Fred Ho’s The Warrior Sisters (1998): A Performance of ‘Transformative Interracialism’” won the West Virginia University Press Award. Jingyi's research is supported by the Virgil Thomson Fellowship from the Society for American Music, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University Asia Center, Richard F. French Fellowship, the GSAS Student Council (GSC), and the Wesley Weyman Fund. She currently serves as the GSAS Student Center Fellow of the World Music Collective at Harvard University, and previous posts include being the Student Representative to AMS (New England Chapter of AMS) from 2019 to 2021 and serving as the Conference Chair of Harvard University Graduate Music Forum 2020 on the theme of global music history and transnational musical exchanges.

An active performer and musicologist, Jingyi holds a double-degree B.M. in music history and piano performance at Oberlin Conservatory under a Dean’s Scholarship Award and International Grant, as well as a double-degree M.A. in musicology and M.M. in piano performance at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music under a three-year Jacobs fellowship. She has held both solo and chamber piano performances in Singapore, China, and the US. At Oberlin Conservatory, Jingyi served as Charles McGuire’s music history course tutor and was awarded the Carol Nott Pedagogy Prize upon graduation. Jingyi is regularly invited as a guest music lecturer by Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), teaching courses on western music history.