Yu Hao Chen

YuHao Chen received his Ph.D. in Music, with graduate certificates in Asian studies and cultural studies, from the University of Pittsburgh in 2025. Upon completing his doctoral studies, he joined the Global Arts + Humanities Society of Fellows at Ohio State University. As a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of Music at Notre Dame, he will continue developing research and creative practice at the intersection of historical sound studies and comparative media studies. YuHao’s work theorizes sound media at the threshold of bodily and archival affordances. His current book project, Phonographic Conversion, examines a constellation of missionary sound-writing in China between the 1870s and the 1920s, arguing that missionaries implemented particular sound recording technologies—from phonetic shorthand to disability reading designs to the phonograph—in order to streamline the conversion of the Word to flesh. His second project reconsiders what it means to listen by decomposing the musicological ear through the displaced voices of seven blind Chinese children in diaspora during the mid-nineteenth century. A trained musician, YuHaomaintains a deep appreciation for arts-based inquiry.