Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit's research focuses on music, race, and imperialism in nineteenth-century Siam. He is interested in issues of aesthetic commensurability in colonial encounter, comparativism and the production of knowledge about non-European musics, and opera as a racializing global-colonial form.

His book project, Race and Sovereignty in the Imperial Music of Siam (under advanced contract with University of Chicago Press), is a history of music and colonialism in Siam at the close of the nineteenth century, when an absolute monarchy in crisis sought to affirm its racial standing amid encroaching European imperial domination across Southeast Asia. The book explores how the Siamese court strategically emulated aspects of European musical thought as a means of negotiating new conceptions of sovereign personhood in colonial contest. The chapters examine reforms in court opera as ethnological spectacle, transformations in Siamese music theory and historiography, and the quest for codifying national song - each shaped within purview of “Europe” as a (sometimes imaginary) interlocutor, wavering between a source of threat and desire. The book centers, then, the discomfort of imperial intimacy, where the colonial target comes to covet the tools of the colonizer as strategic means of racialized self-invention.

As a recipient of the ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, Parkorn spent the 2024-25 academic year as ACLS-CHCI Visiting Fellow at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University.

Parkorn’s work has been generously recognized by the American Musicological Society. His Opera Quarterly article “Voice, Race, and Imperial Ethnology in Colonial Siam: Madama Butterfly at the Court of Chulalongkorn,” received the Alfred Einstein Award for the best musicological article by an early career scholar. In addition to the Paul A. Pisk Prize and the Harold Powers Award, his work has also been supported by the Alvin Johnson AMS50 Fellowship, the Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship, and the Holmes / D’Accone Fellowship.

Born and raised in Bangkok, Thailand, Parkorn received his B.A. in Comparative Literature from Oberlin College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of California, Berkeley. He was Assistant Professor of Musicology at Washington University in St. Louis before joining the Department of Music at Cornell.

Research Interests: Global Music History, Music and Colonialism, Southeast Asian Studies, Opera Studies