Victor A. Vicente is an Associate Professor at the School of Music, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. He is a musicologist specializing in the music and dance cultures of several parts of today’s world, as well as of the distant past. After receiving training in historical musicology, ethnomusicology, conducting, and composition at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania (USA), where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree, he went on to earn a Master of Arts in musicology and Master of Music and Ph.D. degrees in ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland at College Park (USA).

Prof. Vicente is interested in the complementary theories of “music as history” and “music as culture” and employs both sensibilities in his research. He has conducted primary field and archival research in numerous countries, particularly in Turkey, Syria, Egypt, India, Malaysia, Morocco, Spain, Portugal, and Peru. He has presented research findings at academic meetings on six continents and has written and published on issues of aesthetics, religion, cultural representation, cultural politics, tourism, and cross-cultural exchange in music and dance traditions as varied as Mevlevi Sufi practice, Renaissance Portuguese polyphony, and Indian cinema. Currently, he is developing materials for two books: one focused on festivals of World Music around the globe, the other on the role of music in Marvel comic books, films, television series, animation, and video games.

Before coming to Shenzhen, Prof. Vicente taught for 12 years in Hong Kong at the CUHK campus in Shatin and, prior to that, for 9 years in the United States and Turkey, including at the University of Maryland, George Washington University, SUNY College at Brockport, and at Ege University in Bornova-Izmir. He has taught at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels as well as supervised research masters and doctoral students. In addition to directing chamber groups and collegia performing Early Music, he has taught surveys on World Music, World Popular Music, Western Music History, and American Popular Music; regional and genre studies such as the Middle East and Bollywood; special topics relating to music like Dance and Dance History, Performance Studies, Orientalism, World Politics, and World Cinema; and Research Methods, especially ethnographic field techniques as applicable to Shenzhen and the Greater Bay area.