About the Contributor

Shelley Zhang is a writer, researcher, and musician from Toronto, Canada, currently based between Philadelphia and New York City. She is an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and serves as President of the Association for Chinese Music Research. Her first book project examines Chinese musicians of Western classical music through the lenses of precarity, racialization, memory, and migration, developing a theory of “strategic citizenship” grounded in fieldwork across China, Canada, and the United States. Her research has been supported by numerous fellowships and grants, including those from SSHRC, the Wolf Humanities Center, and the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice.

Her second project explores Asiatic femininity and the enduring legacy of the “yellow woman” in contemporary artistic practice. Beyond academia, Dr. Zhang writes poetry and fiction, with her poem The Price of Ambition published by Mormolyke Press and performed by SSAA choirs in 2024. Trained as a classical pianist and organist, she continues to draw inspiration from her musical background in her creative and scholarly work.