Graduate Student Wins Grant for Work on Televised Puppetry

Po-wei Weng, a Ph.D. candidate in Wesleyan’s ethnomusicology program, has won a $15,000 grant to support his dissertation work on a popular Taiwanese Puppet television series. Competing with applicants from all disciplines and many top colleges in the United States, Weng was this year the only person from the music studies field to win an award from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. His dissertation project is “Music, Technology, and Mediated Modernity: Soundscape of Pili Budaixi in Taiwan.” Currently in Taiwan, Weng returns to Middletown in August.