Emily Lu
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Emily Lu is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Florida State University. Her main field is modern East Asian history, with minors in early modern Europe, world history, and ethnomusicology. She holds a B.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and a M.A. in History from East Tennessee State University. Emily’s doctoral dissertation, tentatively titled “Toward an East Asian Utopia: Ambition and Illusion in Japanese Military Music, 1868-1945,” is a study of the intersection between music and politics manifested in the form of military music (gunka) that popularized throughout wartime Japan and most of its colonial periphery. Through examining songs, as well as the writings of musicians and the intelligentsia, this project illustrates the evolution of music as a form of soft propaganda, and a means to rationalizing Japanese imperialism and reconsolidating support from the home front. In addition, the project juxtaposes the Japan case with that of other wartime nations, namely Germany, the U.S., and Brazil, penning an interdisciplinary transnational history of propagandizing cultural production, rooted in shared tellurian response to and captivation by melodic and rhythmic aesthetics.
A trained actress, playwright, and documentary filmmaker, Emily also has composed and directed film and stage productions in New York City. Since coming to FSU, she has partaken in performing arts projects, including her ten-minute play “Kokonron” at Tallahassee Fringe Festival. Emily has presented research topics on gunka, shídàiqŭ, American roots music, and Jesuits in East Asia at annual conferences for the American Historical Association, the Association of Asian Studies, the Society of Ethnomusicology, as well as various graduate conferences. She has served as Associate Lecturer in Asian Studies at UMass Boston and teaches Japanese history at FSU. Emily was a recipient of the Fulbright-Hays DDRA award with affiliation to Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, as well as an awardee to École française d'Extrême-Orient’s Taipei Center at the Academia Sinica.