In the fifth episode of the second season of bαhçές histories of Cyprus, Nicoletta Demetriou, in conversation with bαhçές editor Maria Georgiou, will discuss her attempt to record the stories of Cyprus’s last surviving traditional fiddlers.
She will talk about what musicians’ life stories can tell us about music and society in general, and about the importance of letting musicians tell their own stories.
Nicoletta Demetriou is an ethnomusicologist, singer, creative writing tutor, and documentary maker. She studied music in Thessaloniki, Vienna and London, earning her PhD in Ethnomusicology from SOAS in 2008. She also studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia, specialising in life writing. She was a research fellow in ethnomusicology and life writing at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, from 2012 to 2019, where she also taught Narrative Non-Fiction in the Master’s programme in Creative Writing. In 2017 she was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Interdisciplinary Center for Hellenic Studies at Stockton University, NJ, and in 2019 a Visiting Fellow at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. From 2019 to 2021, Nicoletta was European Commission Widening Fellow at the Department of Educational Sciences, University of Cyprus. In 2022 she founded Cyprus Music Archive, a non-profit organisation that aims to bring Cypriot folk music and poetry to a wider audience.
Her research interests include the folk music and oral poetry of Cyprus and the wider Mediterranean region, Cypriot music and its historiography, as well as the life stories of folk musicians on both sides of the Cypriot divide.
The event will take place online on March 4, at 2 pm.
