David Wilson

David Wilson

Assistant Professor of Music

David Wilson is a scholar of contemporary Taiwanese and Chinese musical media based at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA. His current book project, Music, Media, and Emotional Pedagogies of Citizenship in Modern Taiwan and China illuminates the central role of music in the construction of national identity by examining the entangled media histories of Taiwan and China. In this contrastive account, Wilson charts the ways in which the use of similar cultural resources yields strikingly divergent sociopolitical outcomes, underscoring both the centrality and malleability of musical resources in nation-building programs. 

Wilson has presented his research at conferences and universities including the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and Taiwan’s National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University 陽明交通大學. At the 2022 meeting of the Taiwan Society for Music Studies 台灣音樂學會, David was granted the award for most outstanding student paper. He also writes the Substack newsletter Unmusable (deiwei.substack.com).

David’s research and teaching have been supported by Fulbright-Hays DDRA, the Blakemore Freeman Foundation, the Pozen Center for Human Rights at the University of Chicago, the HMC Alumni Association Board of Governors, multiple Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships from University of Chicago and University of Pittsburgh, and a University of Chicago Provost’s Dissertation Completion Fellowship. 

David received his PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago. He also received his DMA in vocal arts from the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, where he was named outstanding graduate of 2016. He has previously taught a variety of applied and academic music subjects at institutions including Stanford University, New York University, the Joint Music Program of the Claremont Colleges, Middlebury College, and the School for the Art Institute of Chicago.

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