Ya-Hui Cheng
Associate Professor of Music Theory
(On Leave, Fall/2025 to Spring/2026)
Email: chengy@usf.edu
Phone: (813) 974-2311
Ya-Hui Cheng, originally from Taiwan, holds a Ph.D. in Music Theory from Florida State University, an M.A. in Music Education from Teachers College at Columbia University, and a B.A. in Music from Queens College, City University of New York. Her research interests include transcultural sounds in global Chinese popular and folk music, exoticism in Italian operas, and Buddhist music within the Mahayana tradition.
Dr. Cheng has received numerous awards, including the National Opera Association Dissertation Competition Biennial Prize for her studies on Giacomo Puccini, the McKnight Fellowship from the Florida Education Fund, the New Research Grant at the University of South Florida, the Summer Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Public Scholar Fellowship from the Kettering Foundation, among others. She has participated in the International Gugak Workshop at the National Gugak Center in Seoul, South Korea. Additionally, she has served as co-chair of the Analysis of World Music Interest Group and as a member of the Committee on Diversity, both affiliated with the Society for Music Theory.
Cheng is the author of Puccini’s Women: Structuring the Role of the Feminine in Puccini’s Operas (Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009) and The Evolution of Chinese Popular Music: Modernization and Globalization, 1927 to the Present (Routledge: Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series, 2023), which received the Certificate of Merit Award for best historical research in recorded country, folk, world, or roots music from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. Her articles have appeared in Musicology Now, China Policy Institute Analysis Online Journal, The Opera Journal, and the Journal of Historical Research in Music Education.
Currently, she is working on a research project tentatively titled Modern Chinese Folk Music: Identities, Memories, and Intimacy, funded by a Fulbright Senior Scholar award which she will conduct at Taipei National University of the Arts in Taipei, Taiwan, during the 2025-2026 academic year. This project explores the integration of folk elements into contemporary Chinese music, tracing the evolution of global musical modernity within the Chinese context.
Before her appointment at the ßÙßÇÂþ», Cheng was an associate professor of music theory at Fort Valley State University, a historically Black college in Fort Valley, Georgia.