Damjan (AWARDED 2024)

Damjan Rakonjac earned two PhDs from UCLA: one in Musicology (2023) and a second in French & Francophone Studies (2024). Damjan is currently the Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Houston, Moores School of Music. Positioned at the intersection of musicology, area studies, (post)colonial studies, gender studies, and critical media studies, Damjan’s work crosses disciplinary, methodological, and cultural borders in order to decenter and recontextualize Eurocentric models of music history.

Damjan’s growing publications portfolio reflects the variety of his research and teaching interests, including 19^th-century French music, French-Vietnamese musical transculturation, music in film, and global pop. His chapter in The Oxford Handbook of the Television Musical, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, considers the convergence of music, television, and masculinity in The Kinks’ 1974 rock musical, Starmaker. A second article, forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press, is slated to be published in the first ever edited volume dedicated to the films of Trịnh Thị Minh-hà. A third article, “Ca Trù in its Time: Gender, Postcoloniality, and Music in Việt Linh’s Mê Thảo Thời Vang Bóng,” is under contract for an edited volume in collaboration with scholars in Vietnam. Damjan has conducted funded research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris, as well as the Vietnam National Library, Hanoi – the latter as part of Jann Pasler’s European Research Council project, The Sound of Empire in 20^th-c. Colonial Cultures. Damjan is currently working on a book-length project focused on musical transculturation in northern Vietnam during the French colonial period, titled Resounding the Metropole: Musical Encounters in Colonial Tonkin (1883 – 1940).

As a passionate and committed educator, Damjan has garnered a decade of experience teaching music history courses, including six years as instructor of record. Having taught across a range of institutions – such as UCLA, the University of Houston, Chapman University, and Mt. San Antonio College – Damjan has developed skills to work with, and meet the needs of, a wide variety of students, at both the undergraduate and graduate level.