Seokyoung Kim

Seokyoung Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at The University of Texas at Austin. She received her bachelor's degree (2017) and master's degree (2019) in musicology from Seoul National University. Her research interests include opera studies, contemporary music, the use of Eastern materials in American experimentalism, and music criticism. She published “A Study on Tan Dun's The First Emperor: Through the Lens of Cultural Hybridity and Identity” (2019) in The Journal of the Musicological Society of Korea. With this article, Kim received the Next Generation of Musicologists Excellent Paper Award from the Musicological Society of Korea. Kim has presented her research at various institutions, including: “Is There No Opera Without an Audience in the Concert Hall? Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives (1984) and Potential Operatic Forms in the Digital Age” at the Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music (2020), “A Tipping Point of Breaking Down Versus Inheriting Orientalist Opera: In the Case of Heartbeat Opera’s Butterfly (2017)” at the Midwest Graduate Music Consortium (2022), and “Polemic Argument on Modes of Pansori: Timbre as Differentiation in Korean Music” at Harvard University and Griffith University (2022). 

Her dissertation project examines Chinese-born composer Huang Ruo's opera M. Butterfly (2022), an adaptation of Puccini's Madama Butterfly, focusing on interculturality and issues of Asian American representation. This research has been supported by the 2024 AMS Travel/Research Grants.