Christopher Hepburn is a Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow of East Asian Studies and Music in the Van Hunnick Department of History. He is a musicologist, educator, and critic of East Asian music and poetry from antiquity to the present. A specialist in the musicopoetics of premodern Japan, he is especially interested in the role sonicity played in premodern waka, Japan’s oldest and most continuous genre of verse, by expanding on the idea that poets that in and with sound to construct new objects of knowledge and affective-expressive understanding.

His first book, Defining Waka Musically: Songs of Male Love in Premodern Japan(Palgrave, forthcoming), examined how premodern Japanese poets might have thought in and with sound in composing waka. He does this by turning to a period-based understanding through documents of music, musicality, and ideologies of musicality as it pertains to song, a phenomenological understanding of calligraphy, and a semiotic understanding of how such integral elements might be working within the specific construction of male loveas an aspect of musical desire.

He is currently working on his second book, Nanshoku wakashū: A Compendium of Premodern Japanese Songs about Male Love from Antiquity to 1868, which will be the first major reference work in aid of the growing and highly interdisciplinary study of gender, sexuality, and identity of premodern East Asia and, more specifically, of premodern Japan by providing a comprehensive compendium of waka in original and English translation on the theme of male love found, referenced, or alluded to in quasi-historical or historical period Japanese sources from antiquity to 1868.

Dr Hepburn teaches interdisciplinary courses on premodern and contemporary East Asian music, history, and culture, including ‘Musical Histories of East Asia,’ ‘Popular Music Across Asia,’ and he enjoys creating new classes that train students in thinking more broadly about the phenomenon of East Asia’s emergence as a producer of art and our cultural evaluation of the art East Asia has produced.