Lufan Xu

Lufan Xu teaches Western music history in the Department of Musicology at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. She earned a PhD in Musicology from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Music at Harvard University, hosted by Professor Alexander Rehding.

Lufan’s research focuses on early twentieth-century opera and performance and the intellectual history of modern musical thought, and she writes in multiple languages. Her work is translingual: switching languages is a method that often helps her frame global-historical and comparative questions. 

At Harvard, she is bringing Republican-era Chinese musical thought into conversation with contemporaneous musical discourse in Weimar Germany, asking what happens when the desire to hear outward meets the impulse to hear back toward one’s own past.