Yvonne Liao is a music historian. Broadly speaking, her work is concerned with empires and entanglements, both in an epistemic and material sense. In this context, she is particularly intrigued by questions of music, power, practice across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, for instance in relation to colonial musical legacies in China's treaty port history and beyond, as well as current academic discourse, learning, and community engagement. Parallel to all this is a fascination with postcolonial storying and its narrative stakes, channeling between pasts and futures and extending to three other intersecting areas of interest: performing arts organizations, public humanities, and animation studies and animal studies.

Yvonne's recent funded work includes the project, "Inventive Lives: Indigenous Musical Canons and Symphony Orchestras in Contemporary Hong Kong," supported by the Early Career Scheme of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (2024–2026), and a smaller project, "Between the Cartoon and the Canon: McDull's Epistemic Significations for Global Musicology," supported by a Direct Grant from the Faculty of Arts, CUHK (2023–2024).

Yvonne's publications have appeared in Journal of Global History, Postcolonial Studies, The Chopin Review, Cambridge Opera Journal, and The Musical Quarterly, for which she was awarded the Royal Musical Association's Jerome Roche Prize in 2017 for a distinguished article by an early career scholar. With Erin Johnson-Williams and Roe-Min Kok, she is co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism (forthcoming). She is also preparing her first monograph, Imperfect Global, Imperfect Empire: Writing Musical Lives across Shanghai and Hong Kong, 1897–2024, under contract with University of Chicago Press (New Material Histories of Music Series).

Yvonne's wide-ranging interests as a teacher extend from exploring questions rooted in music history and historiography to articulating these questions with class, creativity, and capital, and their practical implications for fostering meaningful discourse and engagement. At CUHK she was nominated for the Faculty of Arts Exemplary Teaching Award 2025, while at Edinburgh she was nominated for the Edinburgh University Students' Association 2021–2022 Teaching Awards, in the category "Teacher of the Year."

A keen advocate of collaborative work, Yvonne is a founding co-lead of CPAGH, Colonial Ports and Global History, an interdisciplinary research network established at TORCH in 2018 with Julia Binter, Olivia Durand, Helena F. S. Lopes, Katharina Oke, Min-Erh Wang, and Hatice Yıldız. With Joe Davies, Yvonne is a founding co-lead of WIGM, Women in Global Music, a research and industry network launched in 2021. With Olivia Bloechl and Gabriel Solis, she is a founding member of the American Musicological Society's Global Music History Study Group. 

• Imperfect Global, Imperfect Empire: Writing Musical Lives across Shanghai and Hong Kong, 1897–2024. Under contract with University of Chicago Press (New Material Histories of Music Series).

• Johnson-Williams, Erin, Roe-Min Kok, and Yvonne Liao, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

• Liao, Yvonne, Julia T. S. Binter, Olivia Irena Durand, and Helena F. S. Lopes. "Port Cities Storytelling: Drawing on Materials of Neglect." Journal of Global History (2026): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022826100448
• Special Issue
  "Music, empire, colonialism: sounding the archives." Postcolonial Studies 26.3 (2023). https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cpcs20/26/3
  • Burnett, Philip, Erin Johnson-Williams, and Yvonne Liao. "Introduction." Postcolonial Studies 26.3 (2023): 345–359. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2023.2243070
  • Liao, Yvonne. "Penning the stakes: paper and the post/colonial music archive in Shanghai and Hong Kong." Postcolonial Studies 26.3 (2023): 448–468. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2023.2243075
• Liao, Yvonne. "Coiled Colonialities: Pianos and Place Signification in Shanghai's Treaty Port History." The Chopin Review 4–5 (2023): 30–55.  https://doi.org/10.56693/cr.6
• Liao, Yvonne. "'Die gute Unterhaltungsmusik': Landscape, Refugee Cafés, and Sounds of 'Little Vienna' in Wartime Shanghai." The Musical Quarterly 98 (2016): 350–394.  https://doi.org/10.1093/musqtl/gdw004

• Liao, Yvonne. "Post/Colonial Bach." In Rethinking Bach, edited by Bettina Varwig, 59–76. Oxford University Press, 2021.
• Liao, Yvonne. "Empires in Rivalry: Opera Concerts and Foreign Territoriality in Shanghai, 1930–1945." In Operatic Geographies: The Place of Opera and the Opera House, edited by Suzanne Aspden, 149–161. University of Chicago Press, 2019. 
• Liao, Yvonne. "'A Foreign Cosmopolitanism': Treaty Port Shanghai, Ad Hoc Municipal Ensembles, and an Epistemic Modality." In Music History and Cosmopolitanism, edited by Anastasia Belina, Kaarina Kilpiö, and Derek B. Scott, 162–174. Routledge, 2019.

• "'Chinatown' and Global Operatic Knowledge." Review of Nancy Yunhwa Rao, Chinatown Opera Theater in North America (University of Illinois Press, 2017). Cambridge Opera Journal 31: 2–3 (2020): 280–290.

• "Empire's Global Grain: Uneven Connections, Piano Storyboards, and Philharmonic Reviews from Late-Colonial Hong Kong, 1987–1991." Individual Paper at the 35th Annual Meeting of the World History Association, George Mason University Korea, Incheon, South Korea, 25–27 June 2026. [Conference Theme: "Closed Borders and Global Connections: Being Global after Globalization"]
• "Sounding just and adjusted: ongoing learnings from the postcolonial black hole." Pre-recorded paper for the American Musicological Society Pedagogy Study Group Session, American Musicological Society and Society for Music Theory Joint Annual Meeting, Minneapolis, USA, 6–9 November 2025. [Session Theme: "Sounding Just? Pathways to Equity in Global Music Pedagogies beyond North America"]
• "'Piggy Sinfonietta': Artist Associate McDull and an Animist Music History of the Postcolony." Individual Paper at the 17th Annual Conference of the International Society for Cultural History, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, 16–19 June 2025. [Conference Theme: "Human/Nature – Entanglements in Cultural History"]
• "Legacy's legacy: Canonicity and its re/articulations within postcolonial method." Individual Paper at the 47^th National Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia, Online, 28–30 November 2024.
• "Life, Bun, and Pork: Singing Postcolonial Animals, Earworm Animation, and Indigenous Canonical Animacy." Individual Paper at the 35^th Annual Society for Animation Studies Conference, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 1–4 July 2024. [Conference Theme: "Animating Change"]
• "Global (Un)Doing, the Pig, and the Piano." Invited Keynote at the International Musicological Society Global Music History Study Group Conference, University of Santo Tomas, Manila, 3–4 November 2023. [Conference Theme: "Resonances: Exploring Global Music Histories Across Cultures"]
• "The Ludpig-Ludwig Prism: Outthinking a Cognitive Canonical Empire in Music History." Individual Paper at the 15th Annual Conference of the International Society for Cultural History, Singapore Management University, Singapore, 19–22 June 2023. [Conference Theme: "Cultural Histories of Empire" / Conference held simultaneously with the Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies World Congress]

• UGED1085 Beethoven in China and the West
• UGEC2135 Decolonizing Classical Music [New SDG-GE University Course from AY 2023–2024]
• MUSC2882 History of Western Music II
• MUSC3213 History of Western Music: Special Topic I: Towards a Global Western Art Music
• MUSC3582 Selected Topic in Music and Society: Understanding Classical Music Organizations
• MUSC4243 Research Methods in Music 
• MUSC4813 Senior Thesis I
• MUSC4823 Senior Thesis II
• MUSC5104 Music in Film [MA Course]
• MUSC6252 Special Topic in Ethnomusicology I: Understanding Classical Music Organizations
• MUSC6358 Topics in Musicology II: Towards a Global Western Art Music
• ARTS7001 Performing Public Humanities [New Faculty of Arts RPg Interdisciplinary Course from AY 2024–2025]