Generate a tailored SOP for Dr. Jennifer Hsieh. Improve your application with a focused, well-structured draft.
Jennifer C. Hsieh is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology. She investigates sensory practices within institutional technological settings, with an emphasis on urban East Asia. Her ethnographic sensibilities were cultivated during her time as a Congressional Page in the U.S. House of Representatives, coinciding with the 9/11 events, where she witnessed the national response firsthand. With a background as a classically-trained pianist and studio audio engineer, her unique approach to anthropology integrates sound, sensory studies, science and technology studies, and the anthropology of the state. Hsieh employs a combination of ethnographic, historical, and experimental methods along with audio recordings, soundwalks, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to explore multisensory configurations of human sociality. Her research focuses on the significance of the history of technology, media communication studies, musicology, and Asian studies. Hsieh received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University and has held research fellowships at the Vossius Center at the University of Amsterdam, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Fairbank Center at Harvard University. Her recent book project, tentatively titled Festival Decibel: Making Noise in Urban Taiwan, analyzes the sociality of hearing and the production of noise as a material and discursive object within Taiwan’s environmental noise-control system.
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science