Hello everyone! My name is Sissi (pronounced as “see-see”—meaning “to muse, to philosophize” or “pathway to wisdom” in Chinese), and I’m very excited to spend the semester with all of you!

I’m a doctoral candidate in the Theatre Program, and am currently writing my dissertation tentatively titled Wukongism: “72 Transformations” in the Age of Transnational and Transmedial Performance.  As you can probably tell from my dissertation title, my research interests include: theorizing intercultural theatre and performance, critical race theory, gender and sexuality, Asian and Asian American performance, mediatization, digital art, affect theory, game theory, and theory of liminality.

As a former concert pianist and on-and-off composer, I have a penchant for musical theatre, especially Broadway musical theatre that employ jazz idioms. I am currently working on a digital project that conceptualizes Broadway musicals as cartography of US sociocultural values through exploring their production of desire, consumption of pleasure, and creation of national identity from the 1920s to the present. The humanities aspect of the project is largely informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological studies. At the very initial stage of this huge project, I am familiarizing myself with data scraping and data mining tools, and exploring possibilities of analyzing the distinctive “Broadway sound” digitally (as opposed to musicologically—using Schenkerian analysis, etc.).  If any of you out there are familiar with sound software, or are interested in exploring sound digitally, please let me know and we could maybe work together!

I am particularly interested in digital art forms that challenge social norms and existent ways of thinking.  I am also a huge fan of games. One goal I have this semester is to initiate a small project (a game or a form of digital art) that stimulates one to rethink and revalue, in a small but significant way, the performance of one’s own everyday life.