Nancy Yunhwa Rao

Nancy Yunhwa Rao Distinguished Professor of Music and Head of Music Theory at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. She has produced award-winning research on a range of topics, including gender and music, sketch studies, music modernism, cultural fusion in music, racial representations, and the music history of early Chinese Americans. Her publications have provided innovative analytical approaches to cross-cultural music, and enhanced public discussions about cultural encounter in music. Through her scholarship, as well as teaching, she has promoted diversity and advanced knowledge and dialogue about the complexity of diversity issues in music scholarship.

Rao’s book, Chinatown Opera Theater in North America received awards from the American Musicological Society, the, Society for American Music, and the Association for Asian American Studies.

At Rutgers, Rao helps students work their way through issues related to various forms of aesthetic concerns, exploitation and collaboration in musical cultural fusion. She encourages her students to explore different theoretical/methodological tools to study the complex phenomenon of cultural fusion, including transcultural theory, cosmopolitanism, and transnational studies.