Deborah Wong, Professor of Music, Thai and Asian American Ethnomusicologist

Deborah Wong will spend the summer of 2008 revisiting old research and starting a new project.  She will spend two weeks in June in residence at the EVIA Digital Archive (Ethnomusicological Video for Instruction and Analysis) at Indiana University, participating in their summer institute.  Along with ten other ethnomusicologists and anthropologists, she will spend two weeks annotating ten hours of her video footage from her research on the Thai ritual to honor teachers (conducted in 1986-89) and Thai funerals (conducted in 1994), which will then be available on the EVIA website.  In July, she will spend two weeks in northeast Thailand doing pilot research supported by a minigrant from the UC Pacific Rim Research Program.  She will explore the four contiguous provinces of Surin, Buriram, Srisaket, and Ubon Ratchathani near the Lao and Cambodian borders, learning about the cultural politics of the border(s) and the relationships between music, performance, and broader representational practices in a region deeply defined by difference.  In late August/early September, she will teach in the Summer Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph and will attend the Guelph Jazz Festival.