Kai Tang is a postdoctoral research associate at the MMRC. She is working on her monograph entitled Engineering the Minorities: Folk Music and the Study of Folk Music in Twenty-First Century China. In the meantime, she is launching a research project on East Asian immigrant communities in Austria.
Kai Tang completed her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at Harvard University in November 2014, with a primary field in Chinese music and a secondary field in Japanese music. She has been working with social and ethnic minorities and committed to developing theoretical tools and methodological approaches from the perspectives of indigenous and underrepresented groups. Before joining the MMRC, she worked in the Department of Sociology at Peking University and also Hope College Music Department in Michigan. Her recent publications include “Singing a Chinese Nation: Heritage Preservation, the Yuanshengtai Movement, and New Trends in Chinese Folk Music in the Twenty-First Century” (2021, Ethnomusicology 65: 1–31) and “Social Imaginary and Musical Persuasion in 21st Century China: A Partial Ethnography of ‘Floating’ Migrant Music” (2020, Ethnomusicology Forum 29: 187–212). In 2021, she was awarded the Rulan Chao Pian Prize from the Association for Chinese Music Research, for the best article published on Chinese music. In 2022, she received the Society for Ethnomusicology’s 2022 Deborah Wong Research and Publication Award for the support of her book project Engineering the Minorities.