Nicoletta Demetriou

Visiting Fellow, Spring 2019

Affiliation
University of Oxford
Research Project:
From the Fair to the Stage: Cypriot Traditional Music in the Twentieth Century

Contact Info

Nicoletta Demetriou is Research Fellow in Ethnomusicology and Life Writing at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, and Tutor in Narrative Non-Fiction on the University of Oxford’s Master’s program in Creative Writing. She has written on Cypriot traditional music, its history and historiography, and is co-editor of Music in Cyprus (Routledge 2015). She has also led the British Academy-funded project ‘The Cypriot Fiddler’, which resulted in an ethnographic documentary on the last surviving Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot traditional fiddlers (The Cypriot Fiddler; 2016). Nicoletta is currently completing a Greek-language book based on this project, while also working on a critical edition concerning the tradition of tsiattista (Cypriot improvised rhyming couplets), funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture of Cyprus. The first of three volumes was published in May 2018; the second will be published in spring 2019. Nicoletta is also an active performer of Cypriot folksong, and has sung and recorded both in Cyprus and abroad.

About the Research Project

From the Fair to the Stage: Cypriot Traditional Music in the Twentieth Century

My main aim while at Princeton was to work on my monograph on the history of Cypriot traditional music, provisionally entitled “From the Fair to the Stage: Cypriot Traditional Music in the Twentieth Century”. My intention was to use this teaching-free period to research and write. Three of my book’s eight chapters had been written prior to my arrival. I used my time here to write two more chapters, as well as to outline the book’s remaining three chapters. I used the facilities and resources to which I had access here at Princeton (particularly Firestone Library and Mendel Music Library) to check my existing data, edit material, and expand my bibliography. As a result of my fellowship, my book was given a significant boost, which would have taken many more months to achieve, had I carried on with my usual teaching and administrative duties.