Dr Pow Jun Kai

Dr Pow (he/him) is a cultural historian and music scholar specialising in gender, media and technology in twentieth-century Indonesia, Malaya and Western Europe. He studied for a BMus (Hons) at the University of Birmingham, and then moved to King’s College London, where he completed an MA (Distinction) in French Critical Theory and subsequently a PhD in Historical Musicology with a dissertation using psychoanalysis to frame Beethoven reception history.

Dr Pow was appointed Research Fellow in Asian Heritages/Digital History at the University of Leiden, the National Library Singapore and the National Museum of Singapore from 2019 to 2022. His research focuses on gender and the arts mostly in the Malay world, but also the Indonesian diaspora in Europe and the Caribbean. His research languages are English, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, and Malay.

BA Arts Management Dissertations Supervisor

He has previously taught Music and Gender; Society and Gender; Research Methods at the Singapore Institute of Technology.

My current research interests are:

I. intersections of music, gender and technology in early twentieth-century Southeast Asian popular culture, especially in Malaya and Indonesia

II. gender and musical distribution of the Indonesian Angklung across Southeast Asia, the Netherlands and Suriname

III. gender and sexuality issues in Malay cultural productions in the mid-twentieth century from operas to films

• Producer of Four Music Videos, Homesongs, National Arts Council, 2021-2022 (SGD 25,000)

• Research Project, Composing Monumentality, Composers Society of Singapore, National Arts Council, 2021-2022 (SGD 37,500)

• Research Fellowship, National Heritage Board, Singapore, 2021-2022 (SGD30,000): ‘Swing! Filipino innovations and popular music in Singapore, 1939-1959’

• Digital Research Fellowship, National Library Board, Singapore, 2020 (SGD12,000): ‘Music, gender and technology in early twentieth century Malay popular music, 1903-1941’

• Research Fellowship in Asian Heritages, International Institute of Asian Studies, University of Leiden, Netherlands, 2019-2020 (SGD18,500): ‘The partage of patrimony: Angklung music and gender in Singapore, Suriname and the Netherlands’.

• Book project, Singapore Soundscape: Musical Renaissance of a Global City, National Library Board, 2014 (SGD22000)

Articles:

• (Translation) Soon Ai Ling, ‘Birth Song: A Reminiscence’, in Chinese Literature and Thought Today, Spring 2022. WEB
• ‘Why Trans People Stand: The Performance of Postcoloniality and Power in Portraiture’, Trans Asia Photography Vol. 11, No. 2, 2021. WEB
• ‘Lesbian Liebestod: Sapphic Suicide in a Chinese Society’,  in ‘What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Queer Death?’, Whatever. A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies Vol. 4, 2021, 619-623. WEB
• ‘”In The Raw”: Posing, Photography, and Trans*Aesthetics’, Transgender Studies Quarterly 5, No. 3, 2018, 443-455. WEB
• ‘Trans-aesthetics: The Art of Ming Wong Between Nation and State’, Intersections 38, 2015. WEB (Cited by Milan Pribisic in I Confess! Montreal: MQUP)
• ‘The Dialectics of Capitalist Reclamation, Or Traditional Malay Music at the Fin de Siècle Singapore’, South East Asia Research 22(1), 2014, 123-140. PDF
• ‘Adorno and Jameson on the Dance Floor: Minimal Techno and the Charge of the Culture Industry’, The Musicology Review 8, 2013, 1-19. WEB

Edited Book:

• (with Ho Chee Kong) Singapore Soundscape: Musical Renaissance of a Global City. Singapore: National Library Board, 2014. WEB
• (with Audrey Yue) Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012. WEB

Book Chapters:

• ‘Symbolic Listening: The Enjoyment of Resistance and the Resistance of Enjoyment’, in Samuel Wilson (ed.), Music and Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge, 2018.
• ‘Jolivet’s Beethoven: Supplementarity, Topicality, Alterity’, in Deborah Mawer (ed.), Historical Interplay in French Music and Culture, London: Routledge, 2018.
•  ‘Foucault v. Singapore: Biopolitics and Geopolitics in Contemporary Queer Films’, in Stephen Teo and Liew Kai Khiun (eds.), Singapore Cinema: New Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge, 2017, 129-143. WEB
• ‘Kiasipolitics: Sagas, Scandals and Suicides in Johann S. Lee’s Peculiar Chris’, in Wernmei Yong Ade and Lim Lee Ching (eds.), Contemporary Arts as Political Practice in Singapore, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 45-61. WEB
•  ‘Trans-mothering on Singapore Siniticate Screens’, in Brian Bergen-Aurand, Wai-Siam Hee and Mary Mazzilli, Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and Ethics, Los Angeles: Bridge21, 2014, 95-111. WEB
• ‘Introduction: The Changing Soundscape of a Global City’ in Jun Zubillaga-Pow and Ho Chee Kong (eds.) Singapore Soundscape: Musical Renaissance of a Global City. Singapore: National Library Board, 2014, 14-21. WEB
• ‘Western Classical Music: A Metahistory’ in Jun Zubillaga-Pow and Ho Chee Kong (eds.) Singapore Soundscape: Musical Renaissance of a Global City. Singapore: National Library Board, 2014, 35-53. WEB
• ‘Sejarah Muzik Singapura: a Short Story on Malay Nostalgia’ in Jun Zubillaga-Pow and Ho Chee Kong (eds.) Singapore Soundscape: Musical Renaissance of a Global City. Singapore: National Library Board, 2014, 99-114. WEB
• ‘Government Policies on Music’ in Jun Zubillaga-Pow and Ho Chee Kong (eds.) Singapore Soundscape: Musical Renaissance of a Global City. Singapore: National Library Board, 2014, 200-212. WEB
• ‘Globalizing the Renaissance City: Music in the 21st-century’ in Jun Zubillaga-Pow and Ho Chee Kong (eds.) Singapore Soundscape: Musical Renaissance of a Global City. Singapore: National Library Board, 2014, 287-293. WEB
• ‘The Negative Dialectics of Homonationalism, Or Singapore English Newspapers and Queer World-making’, in Audrey Yue and Jun Zubillaga-Pow (eds.) Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012, 149-160. WEB