Yu Jun Choi

Postdoctoral Fellow

Postdoctoral fellow Yu Jun Choi will be in residence in the Department of Music from December 2006 to December 2007, supported by a major fellowship from the Korean Research Foundation. His faculty host is Deborah Wong.

Dr. Choi is a specialist in the aesthetics of music, modernity, cultural politics, and popular culture. He received his Ph.D. in the Cultural Study of Music from the Department of Music and Culture, Dong-A University, in 2006. He also holds an M.A. in the Aesthetics of Music from the Department of Aesthetics, Seoul National University (1997) and a B.A. from the Department of German, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (1994). During 2005-06 he was Visiting Professor in the Department of Music at Dong-A University.

He writes,

As a scholar of music and culture, I have immersed myself in music aesthetics and ethnomusicology for a long time.  I have worked to introduce musicology to Korean audiences by translating into Korean such works as Max Paddison’s Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music and Christopher Small’s Musicking: The Meanings of Listening and Performing. My areas of interest include issues of modernity, performance, cultural politics, mass media and popular music. I employ a musico-sociological approach to these issues. I am also quite into anthropological approaches focused on the musics of ‘secondary oral culture’, especially the African American music of the early recording industry.

He is the author of Beyond the Imaginary Dichotomy of Popular Music and Art Music ( Seoul: Chaeksesang, 2004) and co-author of Dialogue between South and North Korean Performing Arts ( Seoul: Sigong Publishing Co., 2003), both in Korean.

During his year at UCR, Dr. Choi will work on a comparative study of the hybridity of musics in the age of globalization and mass media. He can be contacted at hoggenug@naver.com.

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