DAMJAN RAKONJAC

Damjan Rakonjac is a musicologist who works across the disciplinary borders of music history, area studies, (post)colonial studies, gender/sexuality studies, and media studies. His primary research interests include 19th century French art music, musical life in French colonial Vietnam, music for film/tv/media, and global pop. As a multilingual scholar, Damjan works directly with English, French, Serbian, and Vietnamese materials to develop decentered, global perspectives on music. His work is motivated by transnational and interdisciplinary modes of collaboration that promote relational approaches to music research and pedagogy. Damjan earned two PhDs from the University of California, Los Angeles: in Musicology (2023) and in French & Francophone Studies (2024). Funded by multiple Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships (FLAS) from the U.S. Department of Education, Damjan studied Vietnamese at UCLA and Vietnam National University, Hanoi.

As a passionate and versatile educator, Damjan teaches undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of Houston’s Moores School of Music, and serves on doctoral committees. Damjan has previously taught at UCLA, Chapman University, and Mt. San Antonio College, where he garnered a decade of experience working with a diverse array of students, including international students, first-generation students, and students with disabilities. Damjan has taught courses about a variety of musical genres/topics, including European art music, world music, jazz, rock’n’roll, punk, LGBTQ pop perspectives, electronic dance music, and film music. At the University of Houston, Damjan has taught courses such as Music History II (survey of European art music 1750-1900); Music and Culture (focusing on global pop); Debussy: Music and the Arts (a graduate seminar); and Introduction to Research Methods in Musicology.

Damjan’s growing publication portfolio reflects the variety of his research and teaching interests. His forthcoming chapter in The Oxford Handbook of the Television Musical breaks down the convergence of music, the television medium, and representations of masculinity in The Kinks’ 1974 televised rock musical, Starmaker. A second essay is slated for publication by Edinburgh University Press in Refocus: the films of Trinh T. Minh-ha; and a third, on music in the work of Vietnamese director Việt Linh, is in preparation for an edited conference volume in collaboration with scholars in Vietnam. Damjan is also currently under contract to write the “key topic” entry for “Film Music” in the Routledge Research Encyclopedia for Screen Studies. Damjan has conducted research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France; the Vietnam National Library, Hanoi (on behalf of Jann Pasler’s European Research Council project, “The Sound of Empire in 20th-c. Colonial Cultures”); as well as the Vietnam National Archives Center I, which houses colonial- era records. He is currently working on a book project focused on musical life and cultural contact in northern Vietnam (Tonkin) during the French colonial period.