Serena Yang is a postdoctoral fellow for the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, interdisciplinary studies, cultural studies, and Asian music. Yang holds a bachelor’s degree in violin from National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan, and a master’s degree in music history from the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music under Bruce McClung.

Yang’s master thesis, “John Cage and Van Meter Ames: Zen Buddhism, Friendship, and Cincinnati,” focuses on the previously undocumented friendship between John Cage and Van Meter Ames and Cage’s residency at the University of Cincinnati in 1967. Yang was the recipient of the University of Cincinnati’s Graduate Student Governance Association Research Fellowship in 2012. She also presented her paper, “A Historiography of Non-Western Music in the Western Music Narrative,” at the AMS Pacific Southwest Chapter in 2013.

Recent Accomplishment

Long-Term Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Fellowship (2020-2022) American Musicological Society Howard Mayer Brown Dissertation Fellowship (2019–2020) UC Davis Humanities Institute Dean’s Graduate Fellowship Summer (2019) University of California, Davis, Graduate Student Travel Award (May 2019) Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Doctoral Fellowship (2018–2019) Nippon Foundation Fellows Scholarship (2016–2017) NEAC Japan Studies U.S. Research Travel Grant Award (Jun 2016) Taiwan’s Government Scholarships to Study Abroad (2015–2016) University of California, Davis, Graduate Student Association Travel Award (2014; 2015)