Stella Zhizhi Li

Graduate Student (Ph.D. Candidate)

Stella Zhizhi Li is a Ph.D. Candidate originally from Beijing, China. She holds a B.A. in Music Theory and Composition from St. Olaf College. Her research revolves around the music and sound of everyday life in twentieth-century East Asia, with emphases on the cultural history of music, sound studies, de-imperialization, and global modernity. She is also deeply invested in interdisciplinary conversations about gender, race, and power in the twentieth and twenty-first century East Asia. Her dissertation is a cultural history of jazz as dance music in Japan under the Allied Occupation (1945–1952), using jazz as a musical mediation to tell intimate, mundane Japanese stories about social transformation and trauma recovery amid the aftermath of the Second World War. In addition to her dissertation research, Stella has also done extensive work on sound and music history in interwar Japan and early modern China. Her previous research examined the intersection between new sound technologies and inventions of public rituals in 1930s Japan. Her M.A. thesis focused on the Sino-Japanese circulations of school songs in early twentieth century China.