School of Arts
& Department of Music
Dr Yuiko Asaba
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Key information
Key information
- Roles
- Department of Music Lecturer (equiv. Assistant Professor) in Music
- Department
- School of Arts & Department of Music
- Qualifications
- BMus, MA, PhD (London)
- Office
- 556
- Email address
- ya13@soas.ac.uk
Biography
Dr. Yuiko Asaba is Lecturer (equiv. Assistant Professor) in Music at SOAS University of London. Her research centres on Latin American popular musics (with particular focus on Argentine tango) and their circulations in the Asia-Pacific.
Yuiko’s first book, Tango in Japan: Cosmopolitanism Beyond the West (University of Hawai‘i Press, In Production), offers the first in-depth study on Japan-Argentina musical connections dating back to the 1910s up to the present. Her publications on Argentine tango and its global flows have appeared in journals including the Ethnomusicology Forum and the Popular Music Studies, with publications forthcoming with the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, the Cambridge Companion to Tango, and the Oxford Handbook of Global Popular Music.
She is also co-leading two EU-funded projects: ‘Resonating Across Oceanic Currents: A Maritime History of Popular Music in and from Japan, 1920s-1960s’, and ‘Asia - Latin America: Decentering Global Music History in the 20th Century’. Yuiko serves as the Editorial Assistant on the Editorial Board of the Yearbook for Traditional Music.
Yuiko previously worked at the University of Oxford, Royal Holloway, University of London, University of Huddersfield, and the Royal College of Music, London. At the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), Yuiko has acted as the Chair of the SEM Council Nominating Committee and the SEM Council Secretary (2020-2022). She currently serves as the Board Secretary on the SEM Board of Directors (2023-2025).
Originally trained as a violinist, Yuiko studied tango violin performance in Argentina with the violinist of Astor Piazzolla Y Su Quinteto Tango Nuevo, Fernando Suárez Paz, whilst receiving tango orchestral training at the Orquesta Escuela de Tango Emilio Balcarce at the Ministry of Culture of Buenos Aires. She has since then performed professionally as a member of the National Orchestra of Argentine Music Juan de Dios Filiberto in Argentina, and Tango Orchestra Astrorico in Japan. She completed a PhD in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2017.
Research interests
Music of/in East Asia and Latin America (in particular, Argentina, Japan, and China); Global Music Histories; Argentine Tango; Performance Theory
