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Christopher Hepburn is a musicologist whose work explores how individuals and communities, whether real or imagined, embody music and sound as a way of expressing lived experience. He investigates how global musical practices serve (across time, space, and media) as affective and imaginative sites through which people engage with history, place, memory and meaning. His research is particularly attuned to music in East Asian contexts, drawing from both historical and contemporary sources to illuminate music’s role in shaping human experience.

His current book project, Playable Pasts, Audible Futures: Culture, Music, and Myth in Genshin Impact, examines how the mobile-first game constructs meaning through history, sound and digital myth-making. The study frames Genshin Impact through the phenomenology of music, emphasizing the lived, embodied experience of sound within interactive media.

Hepburn’s first monograph, Defining Waka Musically: Songs of Male Love in Premodern Japan (Palgrave, 2023), was the first in English to explore the intersection of music, poetry and male-male sexuality in classical Japanese culture through the lens of waka, Japan’s oldest and most enduring poetic form. Praised for its interdisciplinary reach and theoretical boldness, the book was nominated for the Lewis Lockwood Award by the American Musicological Society.

He is currently completing two additional co-authored book projects: City Pop Cartographies (with Ken Kato), which explores the aesthetics and politics of Japanese City Pop and related East Asian popular genres (under consideration by University of Hawai‘i Press); and Male-Male Sexuality in Premodern Japan: A Sourcebook and Bibliography (with Or Porath, under contract with Brill). The latter volume brings together a curated selection of primary texts, e.g., literary works, historical records, religious documents, legal codes, and visual materials, many of which will be translated into English for the first time. These are accompanied by contextual introductions, scholarly annotations and a comprehensive annotated bibliography that significantly expands current resources on the topic.

Previously serving as a Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow at the University of Southern California, he has collaborated with libraries, museums and arts institutions on public-facing programming related to East Asian history, music and media. In addition to his academic work, he maintains an active profile as a concert pianist and translator and has contributed to international recording projects, including the complete piano works of Aleksey Stanchinsky for Grand Piano Records, distributed by Naxos.

He completed his Ph.D. thesis under the direction of Asian music scholar Keith Howard (SOAS, University of London), a student of John Blacking, and his Ph.D. studies under the direction of Stacey Jocoy (Texas Tech University), a student of Nicholas Temperley.