Dr Yuiko Asaba ( ya13[*at]soas.ac.uk )

Dr Yuiko Asaba is Lecturer (equiv. Assistant Professor) in Music at SOAS University of London. Trained as a tango violinist with the violinist of Astor Piazzolla’s Quinteto Tango Nuevo, Fernando Suárez Paz, and at the Tango Orchestra School of the Ministry of Culture of Buenos Aires, Yuiko has performed professionally as a member of the National Orchestra of Argentine Music Juan de Dios Filiberto in Argentina, and Tango Orchestra Astrorico in Japan. She completed a Ph.D. in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2017. Yuiko’s research examines Latin American popular music and East Asia-Latin America musical connections. Her forthcoming first monograph, titled Tango in Japan: Cosmopolitanism Beyond the West, is in production with the University of Hawai‘i Press for publication in 2024. This is the first in-depth work on Japan-Argentina performance connections dating back to the 1910s up to the present. She has also published, including on Argentine tango and transcultural performances of affect, in the Ethnomusicology Forum and Popular Music Studies, and have publications forthcoming with the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, the Oxford Handbook of Global Popular Music, and the Cambridge Companion to Tango. Yuiko is now developing her second book, provisionally titled Choreographing Emigration: Japanese Tango Musicians in Manchuria and Shanghai, 1920-1946, which seeks to join the current debates on decolonising global music histories. She is also co-leading two EU-funded projects: “Resonating Across Oceanic Currents: A Maritime History of Popular Music in and from Japan, 1920s-1960s”, and “Asia – Latin America: Decentering Global Music History in the 20th Century”. She has previously worked at the Royal College of Music, University of Huddersfield, University of Oxford, Royal Holloway, and Osaka University. Yuiko currently serves on the Editorial Board of the Yearbook for Traditional Music.

Prof. Robert Adlington is the Head of Research and Professor of Musicology at the Royal College of Music. He has published extensively on contemporary music, music and democracy, and avant-garde music and the 1960s. Robert Adlington’s monographs include The Music of Harrison Birtwistle (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Louis Andriessen: De Staat (Ashgate, 2004), and Composing Dissent: Avant-garde Music in 1960s Amsterdam (Oxford University Press, 2013). Prof. Adlington convenes various research projects, including Music and Democracy .

Prof. Yusuke Wajima is the Professor in popular musicology and cultural anthropology at Osaka University. His monographs include Creating Enka: The Soul of Japan in the Postwar Era (winners of the IASPM Book Prize and the Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities 2011) and most recently, Dancing the Showa Songs: Studying Japanese Popular Music through Rhythm (NHK Shuppan, 2015). Prof. Wajima is an active member of a wide range of international research networks that foster academic conversations about East Asian and Asian American popular music cultures.