Joshua Pilzer

Joshua Pilzer

Professor

Ethnomusicology

Education

  • PhD, University of Chicago
  • MA, University of Hawaii

Biography

Joshua D. Pilzer is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto. His research and teaching focus on the anthropology of sound and music in modern Korea and Japan, voice studies, gender, trauma and everyday life studies. He is particularly interested in the ethnography of the “everyday,” in the thresholds which link music to other forms of social expression, and in the vistas of ethnomusicology beyond music. His first book, Hearts of Pine, about singing in the lives of Korean survivors of the Japanese “comfort women” system, was published in 2012. His second book, Quietude, was published in 2022 and is an ethnography of the arts of survival among Korean survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and their children. Quietude won the Alan Merriam Prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology. He is currently conducting fieldwork for an ethnography of the voice in everyday life in contemporary Japan, focused on the uses of speaking and singing voices in pedagogies of propriety and authority.