Noriko Manabe, Ph.D.

I am an Associate Professor of Music Studies at Temple University. I conduct research on music and social movements, popular music, and music and trauma, particularly in Japan, Latin America, and the U.S. My research is interdisciplinary, pairing ethnography with musical analysis and drawing on theories from the social sciences, literary studies, and linguistics. I previously taught at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and CUNY, and I have held visiting or affiliate positions at Stanford University and Tokyo University of the Arts. I received a Ph.D. from CUNY Graduate Center with concentrations in both ethnomusicology and music theory.

My publications have addressed music and social movements in the US and Japan; protest chants; the impact of the Japanese language on rap; the aesthetics of Japanese hip-hop DJs; the differences in the online radio markets in the United States and Japan; propaganda in Japanese children’s songs; and the interaction of text and music in the songs of Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez, among other topics. My articles have appeared in Music Theory Online, Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, Music and Politics, Twentieth-Century Music, Asian Music, Latin American Music Review, Transcultural Music Review, two Oxford Handbooks, a Cambridge Companion, a Sage Encyclopedia, and several edited volumes. My article, "We Gon’ Be Alright? The Ambiguities of Kendrick Lamar’s Protest Anthem," published in Music Theory Online, won the 2022 Outstanding Publications Award from the Society for Music Theory (SMT) and the 2019 Outstanding Publications Award from the Popular Music Interest Group at SMT.

My monograph, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima (Oxford University Press, 2015/2016), addresses the role of musicians in (self-)censored environments and the ways they convey their political messages through music in four different performance spaces—cyberspace, demonstrations, festivals, and recordings. It won the John Whitney Hall Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, the BFE Book Prize from the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, and an Honorable Mention for the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. It also won book subvention awards from the Society for Ethnomusicology and the Barr-Feree Foundation. My article on antinuclear demonstrations, which is related to this book, won the Waterman Prize from the Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2014.

My second monograph, Revolution Remixed: Intertextuality in Protest Music (under contract with Oxford, forthcoming), discusses the prevalence of intertextuality in protest music, constructs a typology of this intertextuality, and analyzes the sociopolitical conditions under which certain types are applied, comparing case studies in Japan, the U.S., and U.K.

I am also co-editing two essay collections, The Oxford Handbook of Protest Music (with Eric Drott, under contract) and Nuclear Music: Sonic Responses to War, Disaster, and Power (with Jessica Schwartz, under contract).

I am the Series Editor for the new 33-1/3 Japan Series at Bloomsbury Publishing. Information on the series and on how to submit a proposal can be found here. I am also on the editorial boards for the SOAS Musicology Series (Routledge) and the journals, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Twentieth-Century Music, and Music and Politics. I am a contributing editor for The Asia-Pacific Journal.

I have served the Society for Ethnomusicology as Treasurer and member of the Board of Directors, as a member of the Investment Committee for seventeen years (nine of them as Chair), and as a member of the Council. At the Society for Music Theory, I am chair of the Publication Awards Committee for 2021 and have also served on the Race and Ethnic Diversity, Program, and Investment Committees. At the Association for Asian Studies, I serve on the Finance Committee.

My research has been funded by the NEH Fellowship for Advanced Social Science Research on Japan, Kluge Fellowship, the Japan Foundation Fellowship, the SSRC/JSPS Fellowship, Princeton, and CUNY. My sponsors abroad have included the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) and Tokyo University of the Arts. In addition to Japan, I have conducted archival research and fieldwork in Cuba, Spain, Brazil, Jamaica, Germany, the Netherlands, Mexico, and Indonesia.