Nicholas Chong is an assistant professor of musicology at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Previously, he served as TOMS Core Faculty Fellow and Lecturer in the Core Curriculum at Columbia University, where he taught “Contemporary Civilization,” a “great books” seminar for undergraduates covering chronologically diverse texts in political philosophy, intellectual history, and social thought.

As a musicologist, Chong specializes in the music of the late Classical and Romantic eras in Germany and Austria, focusing particularly on the relationship of the creation and reception of musical works to religious, political, and intellectual history. His first monograph, The Catholic Beethoven, published by Oxford University Press in 2024, explores the relationship of Beethoven and his religious music to German Catholic thought during the Enlightenment. With Daniel K. L. Chua (University of Hong Kong), he is also co-editor of Rethinking Beethoven and the Enlightenment, a collection of essays by an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars scheduled for publication by Cambridge University Press in late 2025. In addition, his articles and essays appear in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and Current Musicology and the edited volumes Beethovens Welt (Laaber-Verlag, 2019), Beethoven Perspectives (forthcoming from the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn), and Beethoven in Context (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press).

Chong earned his Ph.D. in historical musicology from Columbia University. He also holds a B.A. from Yale University and an M.M. in orchestral conducting from the College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati.

Born in Singapore to Malaysian parents, Chong attended high school in Melbourne, Australia, before coming to the United States.