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Shzr Ee Tan is a Reader in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, working across ethnomusicology, performance studies and cultural studies. Her research examines how music, sound and performance illuminate questions of race, migration, labour, digital inequality and shifting geopolitical power, with particular expertise in Sinophone, Southeast Asian and Indigenous worlds. More recently, her work has extended into gender, ageing, care, food cultures and the social infrastructures of everyday life.

She is widely published on decolonisation, EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion), race and representation in music and the performing arts, combining critical scholarship with collaborative ethnography, creative practice and public engagement. A self-described “community busybody” and former journalist, she leads the Radical Aunties initiative and is developing Global Aunties, a major international research project exploring the cultural repertoires of care, labour, health and resourcefulness associated with “Auntiness.” She also writes commentary for the South China Morning Post and The Straits Times in Singapore.

Shzr Ee is also a practising musician with experience across a range of East and Southeast Asian musical traditions.

Shzr Ee recently completed a term as Associate Dean (Culture and Inclusion) for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Royal Holloway. In this role, she initiated an EDI Calendar of Activities, a continuing Safe Space Discussion Series, and workshops addressing subjects including inter-ethnic solidarity, mental health and toxic masculinity. Her work has focused on embedding equality, diversity and inclusion within the everyday structures and working cultures of academic institutions, rather than treating EDI as a separate or occasional activity. She has also contributed to national co-mentoring and community-building initiatives through EDIMS, the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Music Studies network.

Her research is collaborative, publicly engaged and often shaped by questions arising beyond conventional academic settings. Her AHRC-funded project Sounds of Precarious Labour examined the acoustic lives of Southeast Asian transient workers, bringing ethnographic research into conversation with creative practice, lifelong learning, pedagogy and labour activism. This forms part of her broader interest in how music and sound register—and sometimes help people negotiate—migration, inequality, surveillance, exhaustion and the changing organisation of work.

In 2019, with violinist and scholar Mai Kawabata, she initiated Cultural Imperialism and the “New Yellow Peril” in Western Art Music. The project generated international conversations among East and Southeast Asian musicians about racism, cultural authority and representation in classical music, while contributing to Shzr Ee’s developing commitment to activist-informed scholarship and teaching.

With artist Youngsook Choi, she subsequently established Radical Aunties, a collaborative platform centring the creativity, experience and frequently invisibilised labour of East and Southeast Asian women. This work has developed into Global Aunties, a major international research project investigating “Auntiness” as a culturally learned and performed repertoire of care, labour, mediation and resourcefulness. Combining collaborative ethnography, citizen research, performance and creative storytelling, the project asks how informal social infrastructures operate when formal institutions are absent, overstretched or distrusted.

Shzr Ee’s work on decolonisation examines both the possibilities and limitations of institutional EDI discourse, particularly when frameworks developed in the Global North are applied to heterogeneous—and sometimes imagined—“Global South” contexts. She has contributed to international field-building through the ICTMD Dialogues: Towards Decolonizing Music and Dance Studies, serving on its organising committee and helping to develop a multilingual, transnational platform involving scholars, artists, cultural practitioners and community researchers. For the 2021 series, she organised and moderated Kopi One! How to Ownself-Check-Ownself: Chatting about Singaporean/Chinese Privilege in the Lion City and Beyond, a dialogue that used Singaporean vernacular and humour to examine Chinese privilege, minoritisation and the uneven circulation of decolonial ideas. Her contribution to the initiative reflects a wider commitment to treating decolonisation as a situated and collaborative practice, rather than a universally transferable institutional formula.

Related research considers responses to China’s emergence as a cultural and geopolitical power, including the racialisation of Chinese musicians and students, anxieties surrounding Chinese influence, and China’s complicated position as both an object of neo-imperial scrutiny and a potential neo-imperial actor. She also explores the institutionalisation of musical practices in China and their transnational circulation through higher education, asking how international student mobility, offshore campuses, digital teaching and changing immigration regimes reshape ideas of musical knowledge, authority and belonging.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Shzr Ee and Kiku Day organised the international webinar Orchestrating Isolation: Musical Interventions and Inequality in the COVID-19 Fallout. The event examined how the pandemic and accelerated dependence on digital platforms intensified inequalities affecting musicians, freelancers, teachers and researchers in precarious employment.

Shzr Ee completed her PhD at SOAS University of London, studying Amis Indigenous song in Taiwan across the interconnected settings of the village, cultural troupe, popular-music industry and Christian mission. Her monograph, “Beyond ‘Innocence’: Amis Aboriginal Song in Taiwan as an Ecosystem”, developed an ecological approach to Indigenous music-making and its mediation by cultural, commercial and religious institutions.

Her publications span Indigenous and Sinophone music, digital cultures, gender, decolonisation, migration and precarious labour. They include Digital Inequalities and Global Sounds and contributions to the co-edited volumes Music, Indigeneity, Digital Media and Gender in Chinese Music. Her work has been published by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan and the University of Rochester Press, among others.

Before becoming Associate Dean, Shzr Ee served as Director of Postgraduate Taught Programmes in Royal Holloway’s Department of Music, contributing to curriculum and course development. Her teaching encompasses ethnomusicology, music and politics, digital inequality, artificial intelligence, climate change, gender, gastromusicology and the musical cultures of East Asia. She has also taught and delivered guest sessions internationally, including at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and Nanhua University in Taiwan.

Alongside her academic work, Shzr Ee is an active musician with a background in classical piano, jazz, Korean percussion, accordion, Chinese and Okinawan lutes—including the sanxian and sanshin—and the Chinese fiddle, or erhu. She has performed at venues including the Southbank Centre, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, Rich Mix, the Arts House in Singapore and Japan Matsuri in Trafalgar Square.

Before entering academia, she worked as an arts correspondent for The Straits Times in Singapore and subsequently wrote for international newspapers and magazines. She continues to contribute commentary on music, film, culture, race and higher education to The Straits Times, the South China Morning Post and other media. Her wider cultural work has included roles as a dramaturg for the Singapore Arts Festival, academic consultant to London’s Southeast Asian arts platform X-Drifts, co-convenor of the Asian Performing Arts Forum, and mentor for the Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay’s arts residency programme.