Biography
Winnie W. C. Lai is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at Dartmouth College. Her research ranges from Hong Kong protest sounds to performed vocalities in Cantopop and Sinophone pop, interspecies communication, and interpersonal interaction. Dr. Lai’s cutting-edge intermedial methods integrate ethnographic materials with historical archives and engage critical theoretical frameworks. She has published in Ethnomusicology, Openwork, and Hong Kong Studies, and is the recipient of the SEM Crossroads Section's Social Justice Paper Prize (2026), the James T. Koetting Prize (2024), the SEM 21st Century Fellowship (2023), the Penn Price Lab Mellon Mid-Doctoral Fellowship in Digital Humanities (2022-2023), the Penfield Research Award (2022), Tarnopol Graduate Fellowship (2020-2021), an Honorable Mention for the Charles Seeger Prize (2021), and Benjamin Franklin Fellowship (2018-2024). Broadly speaking, Dr. Lai works at the intersection of sound, auralities, and power to grapple with questions about why sound matters and how the sonic and listening are lived in everyday situations. She is completing a multimodal monograph, provisionally entitled Unsounding Hong Kong: From Protests to Silence, which theorizes the dynamics of sound in Hong Kong’s urban spaces where pro-democracy protests once took place and have since disappeared, as well as the sonic and affective currents circulating through the Hong Kong diaspora and transnational protest movements.
Being born and raised in Hong Kong, the city's 2014 Umbrella Movement was a turning point that reoriented Dr. Lai’s life from becoming a fledgling singer-songwriter (winner of the Best Music Video Award from Sony Music Entertainment Hong Kong in 2013) to a junior music and sound scholar working on protest sounds. She graduated from an M.Phil. in musicology at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) with a thesis entitled "Sound and Nonviolence: Music as Political Action in Hong Kong" (2017). That metamorphosis has evolved into Dr. Lai’s academic and personal mission—to be a candid sound scholar and being. In addition to her ongoing intermedial productions and research on power dynamics in (un)sounding social spheres, Dr. Lai is rebuilding her interests as a scholar-performer, concentrating on Sinophone and East Asian R&B and pop music and Cantopop.
At Dartmouth, Dr. Lai taught a new course titled A Critical Inquiry of Sound: Experimental Ethnographic Field Methods in Fall 2025. She has delivered presentations at leading national and international conferences and institutions, including recent (and upcoming) talks at Cambridge (2025), Helsinki (2025), Stanford (2025), Dartmouth (2024, 2025, 2026), Princeton (2026), Penn (2026), New York University (2026), and MIT (2026). Dr. Lai is currently serving as the Co-Chair of the Sound Studies Section and the Secretary of the Northeast Chapter at the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the Secretary-Treasurer of the New England Chapter at the American Musicological Society. She earned her PhD in Music (Ethnomusicology) from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024 with two graduate certificates in digital humanities and experimental ethnography.
Education
B.A. (Hons), Music, The University of Hong Kong (2013)
M.Phil., Musicology, The University of Hong Kong (2017)
Ph.D., Music - Ethnomusicology, University of Pennsylvania (2024)
Dissertation
"Sounding Freedom: Political Aurality and Sound Acts in Hong Kong (Post-)Protest Spaces."
*Awarded the 2023 21st Century Fellowship, The Society for Ethnomusicology.
(Advisor: Professor Jairo Moreno; Committee: Professor Steven Feld, Professor Hedy Law, Professor Timothy Rommen)
Selected Publications
"The Authoritarian Ear: Reorienting Political Aurality and Acoustic Citizenship in Hong Kong." Ethnomusicology 70, no.1 (Spring, 2026): 80-111.
"'Happy Birthday to You': Music as Nonviolent Weapon in the Umbrella Movement." Hong Kong Studies 1, no. 1 (March, 2018): 66-82.
*The article was shortlisted as one of the eight finalist works for the IBP Best Article on Global Hong Kong Studies in Humanities 2021.
Intermedial Projects
Sound installations, ethnographic documentaries, virtual reality projects, sound poems
Performance
Singing (E3 to C6; Popular: Cantopop, R&B, English pop, Mandopop, J-pop; Classical: mezzo-soprano)
Songwriting
Acoustic Guitar
Gong Kebyar (Balinese Gamelan Ensemble)
First published on: June 1, 2019
Last update: April 6, 2026