Kirie Stromberg

B.A., Yale University

M.Phil., Cambridge University, Clare College 

Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 2023

 

I am a humanistic archaeologist, specializing in musical instruments and thought in early East Asia. 

 

Before joining the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (through Archaia), I completed my Ph.D. at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. I was a recipient of the US Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship for my comparative dissertation project (“Music and Political Authority in Early China and Japan: Pre- and Protohistory”), for which I was based at Kyushu University in Itoshima, Japan. Before the pandemic, I excavated at the Neolithic pottery production site, Yangguanzhai (Shaanxi, China), and conducted multi-site research throughout Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces. I am currently co-translator for the English abstracts of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences publication Kaogu (“Archaeology”).

 

My current work focuses on: 1) the relationship between music and the formation of complex society in East Asia, and 2) the foundations of East Asian musical thought as revealed by early texts. I am working on the first monograph in a Western language about dōtaku (Japanese bronze bells of the Yayoi period, ca. 600 BCE-250 CE) and the rich history of their excavation and depiction in subsequent periods. I value breadth and interdisciplinarity. A musician since childhood, I play the violin (decently) and erhu (badly).

 

Publications

 

“The Birth of Yamatogoto Culture: Stringed Instruments and the Formation of Complex Society in Pre- and Protohistoric Japan.” Asian Perspectives 63.1 (in press) 

 

Office Hours:

By appointment