DAMJAN RAKONJAC

Damjan Rakonjac is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Houston. His work explores music’s relational impact across cultures, histories, geographies, genres, and languages through global urban settings. Research areas include music and the arts in Third Republic France (1870 to 1940), music and exoticism, musical life in Vietnam during the French colonial period, music in film, TV, and media, and global pop. Damjan earned two PhDs from UCLA (the University of California, Los Angeles), in Musicology and in French and Francophone Studies. He has conducted funded research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Vietnam National Archives Center I, and the National Library of Vietnam, as well as presented at academic conferences in the US, Europe, and Vietnam.

Damjan co-organized an international symposium about Vietnamese film music, Hear Việt Film, at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music (2022) and is currently co-organizing the interdisciplinary conference Resounding Spaces: Global Approaches to Music and Sound in Urban Contexts, to be hosted at the Moores School of Music, UH (2026). Damjan has been a regular recipient of grants, including multiple Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships from the United States Department of Education, an Innovation Grant from the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, the Global Faculty Development Fund from UH’s Institute for Global Engagement and Office of the Provost, and the New Faculty Research Program from the UH Division of Research.

Damjan’s forthcoming publications are included in the Oxford Handbook of the Television Musical and the Routledge Research Encyclopedia for Screen Studies. He is currently at work on a book project that reframes Claude Debussy’s musical style in relation to the French decorative arts movement circa 1900 and, in so doing, revises current understandings about the origins and significance of European musical modernism.