David Chu

PhD Candidate, Musicology
Office: TC 331
Email: zzhu455@uwo.ca

Biography

David Chu is a PhD candidate in musicology at the Don Wright Faculty of Music. His research is broadly dedicated to the intersection between global music history and Cold War music studies, seeking to catalyse a latent “global turn” within the latter: both cartographically and epistemologically. His dissertation examines how Cold War American composers Leonard Bernstein and Chou Wen-chung tried—and failed—to end the Cold War through monumental music, civilisational universalisms and messianic cultural diplomacy across the Pacific. He holds a master’s degree in musicology from the University of Oxford, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art and the Formosan Journal of Music Research. He has presented on Beijing’s obsession with Beethoven and Hanslick at the 2022 IMS Quinquennial Congress, on Bernstein’s antinuclear commitments at the 2024 Society for American Music conference, and on a transpacific musical hermeneutics of Beethoven based on the aesthetics of Cold War literary icon Eileen Chang. Beyond academia, he served as the assistant conductor of the Sun Yat-sen University Symphony Orchestra.

David has been featured in a Western News article 'Western musicology student explores legacy of Cold War music in Asia' and on the Don Wright Faculty of Music's News Feed.