Emma Baulch is Associate Professor of Media and Communications at Monash University Malaysia. She is Director of the Southeast Asia Research Centre for Digital Tech and Society (SEADS) and Depity Head of School (Research) at the School of Arts and Social Sciences. She received her PhD from Monash University, Australia and held post-doctoral positions at Leiden University, the Australian National University and Queensland University of Technology before commencing her current role at Monash University Malaysia in 2018.

Emma researches media and popular culture using cultural studies approaches, focussing specifically on the co-constitution of media technologies and societies in Indonesia and, more recently, Malaysia. Her PhD studied the role electric guitars played in shaping communities of amateur musicians in Bali in the late-1990s, and was published by Duke University Press in 2007 as Making Scenes: Death Metal, Punk and Reggae in 1990s’ Bali. Her postdoctoral work looked at how television and digital technologies influence the formation of popular music genres, and is the subject of her second book, Genre Publics: Popular Music, Technologies and Class in Indonesia (Wesleyan University Press, 2020). Emma’s current research examines digital infrastructures and everyday life in Southeast Asia. She is co-editor of mHealth innovation in Asia: Grassroots Challenges and Practical Interventions (Springer 2017, with Jerry Watkins and Amina Tariq) and Digital Transactions in Asia (Routledge 2019, with Adrian Athique), and co-author of WhatsApp: From a one-to-one messaging service to a global social media platform (Polity, with Amelia Johns and Ariadna Matamoros Fernandez).

Emma’s research is located in the fields of Asian cultural studies and media and communications studies. She is interested in how new media technologies alter and are altered by existing Southeast Asian social formations revolving around race, class and ethnicity. Most of her research work is ethnographic in nature, and attends to the interaction of material and social worlds through a focus on the everyday uses of new media technologies.

Emma is the unit co-ordinator of Media Studies (AMU1277).