Overview
I am a cultural historian of political economy and music, and a performer on keyboard instruments, both historical and modern. My current research portfolio comprises two main areas: one examines how eighteenth-century music registers and refracts the value regimes of early financial markets; the other traces how keyboard instruments were drawn into the circuits of trade that have come to define the geopolitical architecture of modern global capitalism.
In December 2024, I earned a Ph.D. in musicology from Cornell University with a dissertation on the unexpected yet revealing connections between music and finance in the period surrounding the 1720 South Sea Bubble. My research has been supported by fellowships and grants, including from the American Musicological Society, the Huntington Library, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies at UCLA, the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music, and Cornell’s Institute for European Studies, Council for the Arts, and Center for Historical Keyboards.
Before Cornell, I studied economics and philosophy (B.Econ., University of Hong Kong) as well as music (M.St., with distinction, University of Oxford; M.Phil., University of Hong Kong). I trained as a keyboardist at the Royal Academy of Music in London and at McGill University in Montreal.
In 2024-25, I am serving as a Teaching Associate in Cornell’s Music Department and as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. I have taught introductory courses in Western music history, ethnomusicology, music theory and analysis, and music journalism; upper-level seminars on music and economics; and performance-based courses in historically informed performance, keyboard continuo, and chamber music.
In Fall 2025, I will begin a four-year appointment as a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford. There, I will revise my dissertation into a book while developing a new project exploring the global economic networks that shaped the dissemination and domestication of keyboard instruments and their music in China, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century.
