Staff profile

I joined Durham University in January 2022. Formerly, I was Research Assistant Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Before then, halfway across the world again, I taught as Sessional Lecturer at the University of Toronto, where I obtained my PhD (2020) and where my teaching effectiveness was twice recognised by the Faculty of Music. I hold a BMus (2011) from Royal Holloway, University of London, and an MPhil (2013) from the University of Oxford. I hail from Taiwan. 

I am interested in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German opera, in both German-speaking Europe and East Asia (specifically Japan). Currently, I am working on a new monograph project, which adopts a transnational approach to investigate how Germany and Japan, as young and ambitious empires, articulated their domestic and international aspirations through opera. Various parts of this project have been recognised by a Seal of Excellence from the European Commission in 2020, a Direct Grant from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2021, and a Grant Seedcorn from Durham University in 2022. 

Previously, supported by the DAAD, the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto, and the Austrian Culture Forum New York, to name but a few, my doctoral research explores categories of gender, health, and nation in opera in the context of post-/First World War Austria and Germany. This work is being published as a series of articles, appearing in venues such as the Cambridge Opera Journal, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and Music & Letters. I have also been awarded the 2020 Jerome Roche Prize because of this work. 

As an editor, I am responsible for the review sections of the Royal Musical Association’s two flagship journals: the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and the Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle. I am also part of the curatorial team of the American Musicological Society’s Musicology Now. 

I am invested in building equitable and geographically diverse scholarly networks. Recently, I co-organised (with Vera Wolkowicz) the ‘Global Musicology – Global Music History’ virtual conference, which sought to interrogate ‘global music history’ as both a field and methodology against the geopolitical realities of a ‘global musicology’. Currently, I coordinate (with John Gabriel) an Asian-German Studies in Music Working Group affiliated with the International Musicological Society Global Music History Study Group, and I co-chair (with Kunio Hara and Gavin Lee) the American Musicological Society’s Global East Asian Music Research Study Group. I also serve as a faculty affiliate of Project Spectrum, a US-based, graduate student-led coalition committed to increasing equity, diversity, and inclusion in music studies. 

Journal Article

• Hsieh, Amanda (2023). The Mask of Bourgeois Masculinity and Franz Schreker’s _Die Gezeichneten_. Cambridge Opera Journal 1–26.
• Hsieh, Amanda (2022). Jewish Difference and Recovering ‘Commedia’ Erich W. Korngold’s ‘Die tote Stadt’ in Post-First World War Austria. Music and Letters 103(4): 685-707.
• Hsieh, Amanda (2019). Lyrical Tension, Collective Voices: Masculinity in Alban Berg's _Wozzeck_. Journal of the Royal Musical Association 144(2): 323–362.
• Hsieh, Amanda (2016). Review of Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music: Singing Devils and Distant Sounds. By Peter Franklin. Music and Letters 97(4): 659.
• Hsieh, Amanda (2016). Review of Masculinity in Opera: Gender, History, and New Musicology. Edited by Philip Purvis. Music and Letters 97(3): 519.