DAMJAN RAKONJAC

Damjan Rakonjac earned two PhDs from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA): one in Musicology (2023) and a second in French & Francophone Studies (2024). He has also studied Vietnamese at Vietnam National University, Hanoi. 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.

As a passionate and committed educator, Damjan has garnered a decade of experience teaching music history courses at the university level, including six years as instructor of record. Having taught across a range of institutions – including 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 variety of students. At the University of Houston, Moores School of Music, Damjan teaches both undergraduate and graduate level courses, and serves on doctoral committees. Damjan has taught courses on a variety of musical genres, including European art music, world music, jazz, rock’n’roll, punk, LGBTQ pop, electronic dance music, and film music. Beyond content courses, he served as Teaching Fellow for the upper-division undergraduate course Writing About Music at UCLA and teaches the Introduction to Research Methods in Musicology graduate seminar at the University of Houston.

Damjan’s growing publications portfolio reflects the variety of his research and teaching interests, including 19th -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 20th -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).