Dr Min Yen Ong

Min Yen Ong joined the Oxford Faculty of Music in 2023, after holding faculty and research positions at the University of Cambridge. She is an ethnomusicologist with regional interests in the music of East Asia (with a focus on China), Singapore and Pacific Island cultures (Hawaiʻi and Fiji). She gained her PhD in Ethnomusicology at SOAS, University of London, and went on to lecture at the University of Nottingham, the University of Sheffield and the University of Liverpool.

Min is interested in the role that music plays in empowering individuals and communities. Her research is informed by notions of agency, belonging, resilience, power, nostalgia, sustainability, and contestations of place. Within this context, she has examined China’s intangible cultural heritage safeguarding policies and the pivotal role that elderly literati-amateurs have played in preserving and transmitting Chinese kunqu opera. In the Pacific, she is interested in processes of decolonisation – including the reclamation of place, culture and Indigenous knowledge, as well as practices of renaming – through music, dance, media, and the use of the vernacular. She has also investigated the role of music in rebuilding communities affected by climate change and natural disasters in the Pacific. More recently, inspired by her teaching on music and global development, she has developed a new strand of research on music and dementia, bringing an ethnomusicological perspective to questions of memory, identity, cultural belonging, and care. Min has presented her research in many countries and published chapters in various edited volumes. She is also co-editor of Sound Communities in the Asia Pacific: Music, Media, and Technology (Bloomsbury, 2021).

In addition to being an educator, she is also interested in practice-based work to empower people and aid communities confronted by global structures of inequality. She has experience working within UNESCO and in various sectors of the music industry in London, as well as abroad. These experiences have included international music publishing, recording, editorial work, and film composer management. She is also a classically trained pianist and oboist.