Phone: 858-534-8875
Office: CPMC 242
nguy@ucsd.edu
Nancy Guy is a music scholar whose broad interests include the musics of Taiwan and China, varieties of opera (including European and Chinese forms), music and state politics, and the ecocritical study of music. Guy is the inaugural holder of the Chiu-Shan and Rufina Chen Chancellor’s Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies and the Co-director of UCSD’s Center for Taiwan Studies.
Guy's first book Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan (University of Illinois Press, 2005) won the ASCAP Béla Bartók Award for Excellence in Ethnomusicology and was also named an "Outstanding Academic Title for 2006" by Choice, the review magazine of the Association for College and Research Libraries. Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan tells the story of a performance tradition caught in a sea of ideological ebbs and flows. It demonstrates the impact of the political environment on an art form's development, ranging from determining small musical details (such as how a melody can or cannot be sung) to whether or not a tradition ultimately thrives or withers away.
Guy turned her scholarly interest to Western opera following the death of American opera singer Beverly Sills in 2007. In 2015, she published her second book The Magic of Beverly Sills (University of Illinois Press), in which she takes Sills' singing career as a case study for addressing questions about high art and fandom, elite and mass culture, singing artistry and performance. Through her investigation, Guy corrects the common assumption that opera belongs only to urban elites and demonstrates how Sills' public persona and media presence became a site for the contestation of public culture. Merging archival and ethnographic research and her own love of Sills' music, Guy focuses on the singing actress's artistry and the ineffable aspects of performance that earned Sills a passionate fandom.
Guy’s most recent book is her edited volume Resounding Taiwan: Musical Reverberations Across a Vibrant Island (Routledge 2022). Presenting a window into the cultural lives of the residents of this multicultural and politically contested island, Resounding Taiwan demonstrates how the study of music allows for identification and interpretation of the forces that form Taiwanese society, from politics and policy to reactions to and assertions of such policies. Contributors to this edited volume explore how music shapes life — and life shapes music — in Taiwan, focusing on subjects ranging from musical life under Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945) through to the contemporary creations of Indigenous musicians, popular music performance and production, Hakka Christian religious music, traditional ritual music and theatre, conceptions about sound and noise, and garbage truck music's role in reducing household waste. The volume’s twelve chapters present diverse approaches to their sounding subjects.
Guy has an ongoing interest in the ecocritical study of music. Her article "Flowing down Taiwan's Tamsui River: Towards an Ecomusicology of the Environmental Imagination" appears in the spring/summer 2009 issue of Ethnomusicology, the flagship journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology. The Association for Chinese Music Research awarded this article the 2010 Rulan Chao Pian Publication Prize for the best English-language article on Chinese music. Her ecocritical work also investigates the music of Taiwan's garbage trucks and how these familiar tunes have found their way into multiple forms of the island's popular culture. Guy has presented her ecocritical work at universities around the world, including at Harvard University (2015), National Taiwan University (2015), the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (2016), University of Vienna (2019), National Taiwan Normal University (2021), and Tainan University of the Arts (2024).
Besides her articles published in scholarly journals, her essays appearing in edited volumes include:
In addition to two Fulbright grants, her field research in Taiwan has been supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Education, the ROC-Taiwan Ministry of Education, the ROC-Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the UC San Diego Academic Senate's Committee on Research. Other awards include fellowships from the American Musicological Society (AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Taiwan-based Koo's Foundation, the Hsio-De Foundation, the European Association for Taiwan Studies.