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 in wartime Japan (1931-1945). Through examining military music with references to the colonial periphery (Northeast China/Manchuria, Taiwan, and Korea) and gunka musicians, her research examines the making of a Japanese imperial identity and colonial multiculturalism.
A trained actress, playwright, and 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, shidaiqu, 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 served as Associate Lecturer in Asian Studies at UMass Boston and is currently a Fulbright-Hays DDRA principal candidate affiliated with Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan.
Emily is currently on research leave.