About
Shelley Zhang is the Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and the President of the Association for Chinese Music Research. Born in Hunan, China and raised in Toronto, Canada, she studied classical piano with Rena Lu, Alla Zacarelli, and Boris Lysenko, and organ with John Tuttle. She is currently developing three projects: her first book, Musical Afterlives of the Cultural Revolution: Chinese Classical Musicians in Transpacific Migration, explores the impacts of the Cultural Revolution, one-child policy, and citizenship laws on elite musical practice. Since 2013, she has been working with professional musicians who trained at competitive conservatories in China, Canada, and the U.S. to consider issues of socio-economic precarity, memory, trauma, Orientalism, and transpacific movement together with musical and family ambitions. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Dr. Zhang is developing a new theory of “strategic citizenship.”
Her second project investigates perceptions of Asiatic femininity in North America. Through multi-sited archival work and ethnography with performers, Dr. Zhang studies the history of Chinese and East-Asian women’s immigration and work as performers. How has stage performance helped form North American Orientalisms and conceptions of race and gender? While developing this new project and writing her first book, Dr. Zhang continues to work with the Li Delun Foundation on archival images of the late Chinese conductor that she discovered at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.
Her work has been supported by various sources, such as Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Wolf Humanities Center, the Institutes for the Study of Global Racial Justice and Research on Women at Rutgers University, the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, and many others. She has presented at international conferences, including but not limited to the Society for Ethnomusicology, American Musicological Society, and British International Studies Association. She has also spoken at various universities in Canada, U.K., and U.S., such as at McGill University, Cambridge University, and New York University. Dr. Zhang completed her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, her M.A. and B.Mus at the University of Toronto, and her A.R.C.T. Diploma in Piano Performance at the Royal Conservatory of Music (Canada). At Rutgers University, she is on the Advisory Board for Global Asias and is an affiliate faculty member for Global Asias and the Department of American Studies.
Beyond her scholarly work, Dr. Zhang is passionate about working collaboratively to make education more accessible for diverse learners and exploring the power of storytelling in fiction and non-fiction forms. Her poem, “The Price of Ambition,” was commissioned by the composer Melissa Dunphy for treble choir and published by Mormolyke Press in 2023. Premiered in Minneapolis in 2024, it continues to be performed in various American cities. She continues to write poetry and occasionally performs on piano and organ.
