Dr. Yuiko Asaba is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Research Fellow at the Royal College of Music, London. Her current European Commission funded research project focuses on music, migration and global history, paying particular attention to Japanese Tango musicians in China, 1920-1945. Previous to this, her research looked at the cultural history of Tango’s internalisation in Japan from 1913 to the present day. The ethnographic and historical findings of this research have shaped her forthcoming monograph, Tango in Japan: Orchestrating and Performing a Distant Music (tentative title, forthcoming 2023). Asaba’s research on the circulation of affect, aesthetic and morality surrounding Japanese tango music performance was published in the Ethnomusicology Forum (2019). Her essay on reflexivity and tango in Japan is forthcoming in an edited volume (Yusuke Wajima ed. 2020, Introduction to the Cultural History of Popular Music: Re-Examining Postwar  Japan, Minerva Shobo Japan), and her chapter on the development of tango as a global social dance genre is upcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Global Popular Music (Simone Krüger Bridge ed., Oxford University Press 2021). Yuiko Asaba is also a tango violinist and singer, who has worked professionally as a member of tango orchestras in Japan and Argentina, including the National Orchestra of Argentine Music ‘Juan de Dios Filiberto’.

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.