Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit
Assistant Professor, Music
Academic focus:
Music and sound studies, global music history, music and colonialism, Southeast Asian studies, opera studies
Current research project:
I am a musicologist and cultural historian of music, race, and imperialism. I am working on my book project, “Race and Sovereignty in the Imperial Music of Siam.” It is a history of music and colonialism in Siam at the close of the nineteenth century, when an absolute monarchy in crisis sought to affirm its racial-civilizational standing amid encroaching European imperial domination across Southeast Asia. The book examines how the Siamese court strategically emulated aspects of European musical thought as a means of negotiating new conceptions of racialized personhood in colonial contest. I stress that these musical transformations were not subaltern efforts against European imperial aggression, but rather a waning monarchy’s bid to harness the tools of European imperial power to renew its sovereignty in a newfound global-colonial order. In this sense, the book does not celebrate Siamese ingenuity in instrumentalizing its musical culture as anticolonial resistance. It centers, instead, the discomfort of imperial reciprocity, where the colonial target comes to covet the tools of the colonizer as strategic means of racialized self-invention.
Previous positions:
- Assistant Professor of Musicology, Washington University in St. Louis, 2023-25
Academic background:
- Ph.D., Musicology, University of California, Berkeley, 2023
- M.A., Musicology, University of California, Berkeley, 2018
- B.A., Comparative Literature, Oberlin College, 2015
Last book read:
The last thing I picked up from a bookstore was “Ways of Eating” by Benjamin Wurgraft and Merry White. As a cultural historian of sound and listening, it's interesting to see how scholars deal with the other senses.
In your own time/when not working:
I love attending the theater, concerts and live performances of all kinds. At home I spend a lot of time cooking and baking, trying new recipes and perfecting familiar ones. When I lived in California, I also loved to garden. I'm excited (and a little intimidated) to learn how to garden in a place where it snows!
Courses you’re most looking forward to teaching:
I'm eager to welcome new students into the department through my Elements of Music course this fall. I also look forward to teaching my graduate seminar, Voice, Empire, and Global Music History. I'm also developing a new course in music and Asian American belonging, which I'm very excited about.
What most excites you about Cornell:
Joining a vibrant intellectual community in the Department of Music and meeting new colleagues in the Southeast Asia Program and across campus!
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