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Dr. Kuan Yuan-Yu

Assistant Professor of Music


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r. KUAN Yuan-Yu (官元瑜) is Assistant Professor of the Ethnomusicology program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UHM). His research explores the intercultural exchange of music among Indigenous peoples of island communities in Taiwan, Ryūkyū (Okinawa), and Hawaiʻi. His theoretical emphases include Indigeneity, hybridity, gender, popular music, and public policy and encompass such intercultural settings as Indigenous-to-Indigenous collaborations, community-building events, social movements fostering solidarity, and commercialized cultural festivals. His current project investigates how the notion of Austronesia is musically articulated, conceptualized, and expressed in Sinophone communities. His work has been published in Asian Music and the edited volume China Sounds Across Borders: Migration, Mobility, and Modernity, among others.

Dr. Kuan teaches survey courses on world music, region-focused courses on East Asia and the Pacific, musical cultures of Austronesian-speaking people, gender in Asia-Pacific performing arts, and seminars on music and Indigeneity. From 2021 to 2024, he taught at several Taiwanese universities, including the Music Department of National Tsing Hua University and the College of Indigenous Studies at National Dong Hwa University. From 2011 to 2020, he was a lecturer in the Departments of Music, Asian Studies, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at UHM.

Dr. Kuan received his PhD and MA degrees in Ethnomusicology from UHM and a BA from the Chinese Culture University (Taiwan). He is active in the Society for Ethnomusicology, the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance, the Association for Asian Studies, the Pacific History Association, and the Taiwan Society for Anthropology and Ethnology. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Musicology, National Taiwan University (2023-2024), and the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica (2021-2023), he was active in Taiwanese music studies, serving as deputy secretary-general of the Taiwan Society for Music Studies and executive editor of the Formosan Journal of Music Research.

Dr. Kuan is a conservatory-trained artist of the erhu (Chinese bowed lute) and performs traditional and experimental music, including collaborations with Hawaiian musicians Keola Beamer and Raiatea Helm. He is haumana in Hālau Hula Ka Noʻeau under the direction of Kumu Hula Michael Pili Pang. A native speaker of Taiwanese and Chinese, he is known as Tiway in the Lidaw community of the Amis People of Taiwan.