Winnie W. C. Lai is a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in Music (2026-27) at the University of Hong Kong, after completing a two-year Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Music (2024-26) at Dartmouth College in the US. She earned her PhD in Music Studies (Ethnomusicology) from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024 with two graduate certificates in digital humanities and experimental ethnography.

Broadly speaking, Dr. Lai works at the intersection of sound, auralities, and power to grapple with questions about why sound matters and how the sonic and listening are lived in everyday situations. Her cutting-edge intermedial methods integrate ethnographic materials with historical archives and engage critical theoretical frameworks. She has published in Ethnomusicology, Openwork, and Hong Kong Studies. She is completing a multimodal monograph, provisionally entitled Unsounding Hong Kong: From Protest to Silence. During the HKU visiting year, she develops immersive (auto)ethnographic research, Singing Cantopop Aesthetics: Creative Practice and the Making of Hong Kong Popular Music, and releases digital singles under the stage name, ARIALMA. The project takes a practice-led (ethno)musicological approach to exploring a fundamental question: What gives a song the distinct sound of Cantopop—a “Cantopop flavor”? It regards “Cantopop flavor” as an insider, historically evolving, and sometimes debated aesthetic category—a practical term musicians and listeners use to express what makes music sound distinctly local, culturally significant, artistically persuasive, commercially recognizable, or, conversely, not quite “Cantopop.”

Dr. Lai is the recipient of the Diego Carpitella Scholarship for Audiovisual Ethnography in Intercultural Music Studies (2026), the SEM Crossroads Section's Social Justice Paper Prize (2026), the James T. Koetting Prize (2024), the SEM 21st Century Fellowship (2023), the Penn Price Lab Mellon Mid-Doctoral Fellowship in Digital Humanities (2022-2023), the Penfield Research Award (2022), Tarnopol Graduate Fellowship (2020-2021), an Honorable Mention for the Charles Seeger Prize (2021), and Benjamin Franklin Fellowship (2018-2022, 2023-2024). She has delivered presentations at US and international conferences and institutions, including recent talks at Harvard (2023), UBC (2023), Cambridge (2025), Helsinki (2025), Stanford (2025), Emory (2025), Dartmouth (2024, 2025, 2026), Princeton (2026), Penn (2026), UNC-Chapel Hill (2026), New York University (2026), and MIT (2026).

Dr. Lai is currently serving as the Co-Chair (2024-26) of the Sound Studies Section and the Secretary (2025-27) of the Northeast Chapter at the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the Secretary-Treasurer (2025-27) and Chapter Leadership Committee (2026-27) of the New England Chapter at the American Musicological Society. As a public humanist, Dr. Lai is the founder and director of Public Listening, a public humanities initiative that brings scholarly ideas from musicology, sound studies, and the humanities into accessible conversations for curious listeners beyond the classroom. She is the incoming Film and Multimodal Media Review Editor (four-year term) for Ethnomusicology.