Yvonne Liao is a music historian. Broadly speaking, her work is concerned with empires and entanglements, both in an epistemic and material sense. In this context, she is particularly intrigued by questions of music, power, practice across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, for instance in relation to colonial musical legacies in China's treaty port history and beyond, as well as current academic discourse, learning, and community engagement. Parallel to all this is a fascination with postcolonial storying and its narrative stakes, channeling between pasts and futures and extending to three other intersecting areas of interest: performing arts organizations, public humanities, and animation studies & animal studies.

Yvonne's present funded work includes the project, "Inventive Lives: Indigenous Musical Canons and Symphony Orchestras in Contemporary Hong Kong," supported by the Early Career Scheme of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (2024–2025), and a smaller project, "Between the Cartoon and the Canon: McDull's Epistemic Significations for Global Musicology," supported by a Direct Grant from the Faculty of Arts, CUHK (2023–2024).

Before joining CU in 2022 and relocating to HK, a childhood city, Yvonne worked at Oxford as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, with a double footing in the University's Music Faculty and TORCH, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (2017–2020), and a concurrent affiliation as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Humanities at St Cross College (2017–2020). She continued thereafter as a Research Associate at TORCH (2020–2021), and in Scotland as a Teaching Fellow in Musicology at the University of Edinburgh (2021–2022). Still earlier Yvonne read Music as an undergraduate at Christ Church, University of Oxford (1999–2002) and graduated with a first-class degree. After completing an MA in Chinese Studies at SOAS University of London in 2003, she worked at Naxos and Universal Music as a project and marketing manager, and gained an MA in Arts Administration from Columbia University, before returning to higher education in 2012 and obtaining a PhD in Musicology from King's College London for a project titled "Western Music and Municipality in 1930s and 1940s Shanghai." This dissertation (passed without corrections December 2016, PhD awarded January 2017) was given 1st Honorary Mention for the International Musicological Society's first Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2018. Yvonne's writings among other publications have appeared in Cambridge Opera Journal, and The Musical Quarterly, for which she was awarded the Royal Musical Association's Jerome Roche Prize in 2017 for a distinguished article by an early career scholar.

Yvonne's recent publications include a special issue of Postcolonial Studies co-convened with Philip Burnett and Erin Johnson-Williams, titled "Music, Empire, Colonialism: Sounding the Archives," and an article on the colonialities of pianos and place signification in The Chopin Review. With Erin Johnson-Williams and Roe-Min Kok, meanwhile, she is co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism (forthcoming). She is also preparing a monograph under the working title, Imperfect Global: Thinking European Music Cultures in Shanghai and Hong Kong, 1897–1997 (under contract, University of Chicago Press/ New Material Histories of Music Series).

Yvonne's wide-ranging interests as a teacher extend from exploring questions rooted in music history and historiography to articulating these questions with class, creativity, and capital, and their practical implications for fostering meaningful discourse and engagement. While at Edinburgh she was nominated for the Edinburgh University Students' Association 2021–2022 Teaching Awards, in the category "Teacher of the Year."  

A keen advocate of collaborative work, Yvonne is a founding co-lead of CPAGH, Colonial Ports and Global History, an interdisciplinary research network established at TORCH in 2018 with fellow early career scholars Julia Binter, Olivia Durand, Helena F. S. Lopes, Katharina Oke, Min-Erh Wang, and Hatice Yıldız. With Joe Davies, Yvonne is a founding co-lead of WIGM, Women in Global Music, a research and industry network launched in 2021. With Olivia Bloechl and Gabriel Solis, she is a founding member of the American Musicological Society's Global Music History Study Group. 

• Imperfect Global: Thinking European Music Cultures in Shanghai and Hong Kong, 1897–1997. Under contract, University of Chicago Press/ New Material Histories of Music Series.

• Johnson-Williams, Erin, Roe-Min Kok, and Yvonne Liao, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

• Special Issue (corresponding author & guest editor)
  "Music, empire, colonialism: sounding the archives." Postcolonial Studies 26.3 (2023). https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cpcs20/26/3
  • Burnett, Philip, Erin Johnson-Williams, and Yvonne Liao. "Introduction." Postcolonial Studies 26.3 (2023): 345–359. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2023.2243070
  • "Penning the stakes: paper and the post/colonial music archive in Shanghai and Hong Kong." Postcolonial Studies 26.3 (2023): 448–468. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2023.2243075
• "Coiled Colonialities: Pianos and Place Signification in Shanghai's Treaty Port History." The Chopin Review 4–5 (2022): 30–55.  https://doi.org/10.56693/cr.6
• "'Die gute Unterhaltungsmusik': Landscape, Refugee Cafés, and Sounds of 'Little Vienna' in Wartime Shanghai." The Musical Quarterly 98 (2016): 350–394. 

• "'Not becoming GMH': On actionable history and an orchestra's field of action." In The Oxford Handbook of Global Music History, edited by Jessica Bissett Perea, Olivia Bloechl, Daniel F. Castro Pantoja, Hedy Law, and Juliana Pistorius. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
• "Terra Firma Shanghai: Musical Life Formation in the Treaty Port, c.1922." In The Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism, edited by Erin Johnson-Williams, Roe-Min Kok, and Yvonne Liao. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
• "Post/Colonial Bach." In Rethinking Bach, edited by Bettina Varwig, 59–76. Oxford University Press, 2021.
• "Empires in Rivalry: Opera Concerts and Foreign Territoriality in Shanghai, 1930–1945." In Operatic Geographies: The Place of Opera and the Opera House, edited by Suzanne Aspden, 149–161. University of Chicago Press, 2019. 
• "'A Foreign Cosmopolitanism': Treaty Port Shanghai, Ad Hoc Municipal Ensembles, and an Epistemic Modality." In Music History and Cosmopolitanism, edited by Anastasia Belina, Kaarina Kilpiö, and Derek B. Scott, 162–174. Routledge, 2019.

• "'Chinatown' and Global Operatic Knowledge." Review of Nancy Yunhwa Rao, Chinatown Opera Theater in North America (University of Illinois Press, 2017). Cambridge Opera Journal 31: 2–3 (2020): 280–290.

• "Legacy's legacy: Canonicity and its re/articulations within postcolonial method." Individual Paper at the 47^th National Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia, Online, 28–30 November 2024.
• "Life, Bun, and Pork: Singing Postcolonial Animals, Earworm Animation, and Indigenous Canonical Animacy." Individual Paper at the 35^th Annual Society for Animation Studies Conference, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 1–4 July 2024. [Conference Theme: "Animating Change"]
• "Global (Un)Doing, the Pig, and the Piano." Invited Keynote at the International Musicological Society Global Music History Study Group Conference, University of Santo Tomas, Manila, 3–4 November 2023. [Conference Theme: "Resonances: Exploring Global Music Histories Across Cultures"]
• "The Ludpig-Ludwig Prism: Outthinking a Cognitive Canonical Empire in Music History." Individual Paper at the International Society for Cultural History Annual Conference, Singapore Management University, Singapore, 19–22 June 2023. [Conference Theme: "Cultural Histories of Empire" / Conference held simultaneously with the Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies World Congress]

• UGED1085 Beethoven in China and the West
• UGEC2135 Decolonizing Classical Music [New SDG-GE Course from AY 2023–2024]
• MUSC2882 History of Western Music II
• MUSC3213 History of Western Music: Special Topic I: Towards a Global Western Art Music (TAGWAM)
• MUSC3582 Selected Topic in Music and Society: Understanding Classical Music Organizations (UCMO)
• MUSC4243 Research Methods in Music 
• MUSC4813 Senior Thesis I
• MUSC4823 Senior Thesis II
• MUSC6252 Special Topic in Ethnomusicology I: Understanding Classical Music Organizations (UCMO)
• MUSC6358 Topics in Musicology II: Towards a Global Western Art Music (TAGWAM)
• ARTS7001 Performing Public Humanities [New Faculty of Arts Interdisciplinary Course for RPg students from AY 2024–2025 / MUSC5212 Special Topic IV in Music, Industry, and Creativity for MA students]