Faculty

Profile

Ho Chak Law joined the Mannes faculty as Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow in fall 2022 before he has continued as Assistant Professor of Race and Musicology since fall 2024. Having a particular interest in the politics of performance and representation and the anthropology of media and emotion, his historical, contextual, technical, and ethnographic analyses focus on film music, popular music, Asian American music, and music in the Sinophone world. His articles on the place of music and Chinese opera in the history of Sinophone cinema could be found in Music and the Moving Image (2014), TDR: The Drama Review (2021), Teaching Chinese Film from the People’s Republic of China (Modern Language Association, 2024), and Music in Chinese-language Audiovisual Culture Since the 1990s (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). His other publications include an article in Analytical Approaches to World Music (2022) on musical creativity and the pipa solo tradition in the twentieth century; an article in At the Crossroads of Music and the Social Justice (Indiana University Press, 2023) on how Tanya Tagaq responded musically and performatively to the coloniality embodied in the visual narrative of Nanook of the North; an essay in TDR: The Drama Review (2023) on climate change, Beijing Olympics, and the culture of “original ecology”; and an article in Music Theory Spectrum (2024) on the connections between Jon Jang’s Island: The Immigrant Suite No.1 and the history of Railroad Chinese, the soundscape of American Chinatowns, and twentieth-century transpacific media flows. His book project in progress, tentatively titled Cosmopolitan Decadence: Popular Music and the Politics of the Sinophone in the Twentieth Century, demonstrates how, as popular music traveled across a media network that operated and evolved unevenly in different Sinophone localities before, during, and after the Cold War, the sonic diversity of the Sinophone consequential to media imperialism and waves of mass migration became increasingly palpable as a dynamic force that counterbalanced the naturalization of the Chinese nation across the Pacific.

Prof. Law is a recipient of Barbara Barnard Smith Prize (2017) and Rulan Chao Pian Prize (2022) awarded by the Association for Chinese Music Research; he also received an honorable mention in Social Justice Paper Prize (2021) from the Crossroads Section for Difference and Representation of the Society for Ethnomusicology. His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Henry Luce Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Hong Kong Arts Development Council, International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance, the University of Michigan, the University of Pittsburgh, and Hong Kong Baptist University. He currently serves on the RILM Regional Committee of Hong Kong and the executive committee of the ICTMD Study Group on Music of East Asia. He received his Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Michigan, where he was an active member of the Javanese gamelan ensemble while maintaining his practice as a trained sheng player.