The Popular Music in Greece: International Research Collective is open to general participation. To join, please email pmgirc@gmail.com. Only participants that have presented their work at a PMGIRC conference will have their biography listed on the website.

Participant Biographies

Alexandros Baltzis is an associate professor in Sociology of the Arts and Mass Communication at the School of Journalism and Mass Media Studies of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a professor-consultant at the Hellenic Open University (MA programme "Cultural Management"). He has taught as a visiting professor at universities abroad and at the Democritus University of Thrace. He is the author of many papers and chapters in three languages and the editor of three publications. He has participated in many international and local scholarly conferences, as well as in many international and local research projects. He is a member of several local and international academic associations and scholarly networks and a reviewer in international scholarly journals. His research and teaching work focuses on the production and consumption of cultural goods and services, on the effects of globalization on the cultural industries, on cultural management and cultural communication.

Nikos Bozinis was born in Thessaloniki in 1960. He Studied Greek Language, Literature, History and Social Anthropology in the University of Thessaloniki and Cultural Studies in Nottingham Trent University under the supervision of Professor Richard Johnson. He holds a PhD degree in Modern History from the University of Athens and his thesis was edited under the title of Rock Globality and Greek Locality by Nefeli Publishers. He has also published articles on rock culture, Greek popular culture, youth culture, and educational policies. He is currently living in Athens and working as a Senior Executive in Secondary Education.

Spiros Delegos is a doctoral candidate at the Sibelius Academy Uniarts Helsinki, holds a Master’s degree in “Ethnomusicology and Cultural Anthropology” from the University of Athens and a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the University of Patras. He has studied Greek traditional and makam music on the lavta at the Municipal Conservatory of Patras, theory of European Classical Music at the Philharmonic Foundation Conservatory of Patras, Ottoman music and classical mandolin privately. Furthermore, he has got an excellent knowledge of the folk guitar and the Greek three- course bouzouki and baglama. As a musician, he has appeared at numerous musical venues, live concerts and festivals and has composed music for theatre. He is a music teacher at the Philharmonic Foundation Conservatory of Patras, the founder and musical director of the “Urban Greek Popular Music Orchestra” (a large ensemble with string, wind instruments, etc.), and has given an array of musical workshops on makam modality and harmonization in rebetiko. As a scholar, he has presented several papers at (ethno)musicology conferences and published articles in Greek and international scientific journals; he currently translates-edits into Greek the scientific collective book "Greek Music in America" (University Press of Mississippi).

Marilena Gatsiou completed her undergraduate studies at the Department of History, Archeology and Social Anthropology of the University of Thessaly in Volos (Greece) and postgraduate studies at the "Gender, Culture and Society" program of the University of the Aegean in Mytilene (Greece). She also holds an MA in Visual Anthropology from Aarhus University, Denmark. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Anthropology of Panteion University (Athens, Greece). In conversation with feminist and queer theory, her thesis focuses on the study of Kosovo’s pop culture and contemporary art and its connection to local politics. Through her research, she intends to examine new possibilities of agency in (political) aesthetics and visual cultures. Her interests include queer theory and politics of desire, as well as visual cultures in and around Balkans and South Eastern Europe. 

Eleni Kallimopoulou is Assistant Professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (PhD, MMus, SOAS, University of London). She is author of Paradosiaká: Music, Meaning and Identity in Modern Greece (Routledge, 2009), co-author of Learning Culture through City Soundscapes – A Teacher Handbook (University of Macedonia, 2013), and co-editor of Counter-Archives: Rethinking Oral History from Below (Greel Oral History Association, 2021), Music Communities in 21st-century Greece: Sonic Glances in the Field (Pedio, 2020), and Introduction  in Ethnomusicology (Asini, 2014). Her research interests span the fields of usical performance and ethnography, Popular music and artistic labour, Nationalism, public folklore and the politics of culture, Oral history, Auditory culture and urban space, Epistemology and methodology of research, Applied ethnomusicology, Critical pedagogy. She is a founding member of the research team sonorCities, and a member of the International Advisory Board of Ethnomusicology Forum.

Alexandra Karamoutsiou is a PhD Candidate of the Music Department of Auth University of Thessaloniki, and she is researching the DIY music activities of the city. During the past years she presented parts of her research work in several conferences, organized by IASPM, KISMIF and Punk Scholars Network.

Daniel Koglin was born in Germany, and studied musicology, psychology and philosophy in Freiburg, Salonica, and Berlin. Since 2000 he has lived in Athens, where he completed a course of study in Byzantine church music, postgraduate studies in linguistics, and doctoral studies in ethnomusicology. In his dissertation he compared the ways in which audiences in present-day Athens and Istanbul perceive the popular song genre rebetiko. He has authored several journal and book articles as well as two monographs on Greek music, one of them being Greek Rebetiko from a Psychocultural Perspective (London: Routledge 2016).

Natalia Koutsougera is an anthropologist and director of ethnographic films working at the intersection of anthropology of dance, visual anthropology, gender, youth, popular and hip hop studies. Her doctoral research focused on the popular (laïkó) night clubbing practices of working-class youth cultures in Athens. Her postdoctoral research revolves around hip hop, urban dance scenes and street femininities. She has produced two ethnographic films on hip hop and street dance styles in Greece entitled “Born to Break” (2011) and “The Girls are here” (2015).  She works as Laboratory Teaching Staff in the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University, Athens where she teaches the courses “Anthropology of Youth Cultures” and “Anthropology of Dance”. Her forthcoming documentarian venture entitled “Girls Wanna Just Dance” exploring femininities in urban dance styles is about to be accomplished in December 2023.

Leandros Kyriakopoulos is a social anthropologist with an interest in social media, audio-visual technologies, music (rave) cultures and technoaesthetics. He is the author of Representations of the Uncanny: Nomadism and Aesthetics in the Psychedelic Rave (2020, Nissos Publications, in Greek), and editor of the thematic issues, Spaces made of Sound – Times of Technique: Interfaces between Technology, Networks, Music and the Body (Automaton: Journal of Digital Media and Culture 1:2) and Digitality – Aestheticization – Autonomy of Affect (Utopia Journal vol. 133). He is a postdoctoral fellow in the Research Centre for the Humanities (RCH), Athens, Greece; and the State Scholarships Foundation (IKY) of Greece. He has lectured in the departments of Social Anthropology at Panteion University, History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology, and Culture, and Creative Media and Industries at the University of Thessaly. He is currently a HORIZON 2020-ERC postdoctoral researcher in the Consolidation Grant MUTE, at the Institute of Historical Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation, working on the uses of sound technologies in conditions of warfare and torture.

Panayotis (Paddy) League is a musicologist, composer, and performer specializing in the traditional music and oral poetry of Greece, Northeast Brazil, Ireland, and the American South. He currently serves as Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology and Director of the Center for Music of the Americas at Florida State University, where he teaches seminars on ethnographic theory and practice, critical approaches to historiography, and public-facing folklore and musicology. His research has appeared in journals such as Ethnomusicology, the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, the Journal of Greek Media and Culture, the Harvard Review of Latin America, and multiple edited collections, and his monograph, Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-Sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora, was recently published by University of Michigan Press. He frequently performs and records traditional Greek and Irish music, Brazilian popular music, and original instrumental rock and musical settings of poetry in various languages. In 2019 he was named a Master Artist by the Florida Folklife Program for his work teaching the traditional music and oral poetry of Kalymnos to youth in his home community of Tarpon Springs, Florida, where his family has worked in the sponge diving industry and public education since the early twentieth century.

Michalis Panagiotopoulos is a graduate of the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly, majoring in Social Anthropology (2023).  For his undergraduate thesis, he conducted ethnographic research on female listeners of Greek rap music.

Anna Papaeti is Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant MUTE – Soundscapes of Trauma: Music, Sound, and the Ethics of Witnessing (Horizon 2020, grant agreement no. 101002720) at the Institute of Historical Research at the National Hellenic Research Foundation. She writes about the nexus of sound, violence, and trauma, as well as music and politics. Her research has been supported by the European Commission (FP7, Horizon 2020), DAAD, Onassis Foundation, and the Centre for Research for the Humanities, Athens. She has published widely in edited volumes and scholarly journals and has co-edited two special issues on music and torture. She is also a research-based-art practitioner, working in sound and textual forms.

Penelope Papailias is an associate professor of social anthropology at the University of Thessaly where she directs the Laboratory of Social Anthropology and the Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities. Her ethnographic research concerns the politics of memory and historical culture in Greece, with an emphasis on colonial afterlives and technologies of mediation. She is a founding member of the initiative dëcoloиıze hellάş and associate editor of World Anthropologies for the journal American Anthropologist.

Evanthia Patsiaoura works on the intersections of music, spiritual experience, popular culture and locality, with an ethnographic focus on Nigerian gospel music and African Pentecostal Christianities. Prior to her appointment as Lecturer in Ethnomusicology in the University of Manchester in 2021, Evanthia was awarded a DEL doctoral scholarship and two FAPESP postdoctoral fellowship grants, which allowed her to conduct multi-sited fieldwork in Greece, Brazil, Nigeria, the UK and the social media. Evanthia's recent and forthcoming publications contribute to discussions of locality and diaspora, religion and popular music and culture, and ethnographic methodology. Her work appears in outlets like Popular Music and Society, The Sage Research Methods Foundations, The Routledge Companion to the Study of Local Musicking, and Mana: Studies in Social Anthropology. Evanthia has taught a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, Ethnography and Fieldwork, while directing Nigerian gospel singing ensembles at Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Manchester, UK, as well as the State University of Campinas, Brazil.  

Nick Poulakis is a staff member of the Ethnomusicology and Cultural Anthropology Laboratory at the Department of Music Studies of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where he teaches film music, ethnographic cinema, and applied ethnomusicology. He is also an adjunct instructor in Modern Greek Culture Program of the Hellenic Open University. He has been involved in various research projects and has written several articles and book chapters on ethnomusicological films, video life-stories of migrants, anthropology of film and TV music, media education, and audiovisual literacy. His recent books published in Greek include Musicology and Cinema: Critical Approaches to the Music of Modern Greek Films,Music from Optical Theater and Silent Cinema and World Musics: Soundscapes, Identities, and Practices.

Spyros Pratilas is a PhD candidate in the Department of Music Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He graduated from the same Department with a BA in Ethnomusicology and Cultural Anthropology (2018). He also has a Master's degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the Panteion University of Athens (2021). He holds diplomas in piano and musical composition from the Athens Music Association Conservatory (1999) and he has been working as a music teacher in public education since 2003. His research interests cover the study of musical/cultural collective identity and heritage, and their relation to the social visibility and inclusion of minority, refugee and emigrant groups, as well as the dialogical relationship that distinct popular musics develop while being performed and interacting within the complex ethno/cultural and social/political framework of contemporary Greece.

Yona Stamatis is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and director of the Music Program at the University of Illinois Springfield. Her research interests include Greek folk and popular song with particular attention to contemporary rebetika practices, diaspora and migration studies, and the intersections of music and democracy theory. Recent publications focus on music as gendered practice, rebetika performance and catharsis, and music as form of political socialization. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Constantine Tsangadas Fellowship for Hellenic Studies.  She is the music editor of the journal Ergon: Greek/American and Diaspora Studies. She is an active musician as a violinist and bouzouki player.

Aspasia (Sissie) Theodosiou is a social anthropologist and associate professor at the Department of Music Studies of the University of Ioannina. Her research includes long-time fieldwork among Gypsy/Roma musicians in Epirus (Greek-Albanian border) and more recently research with the Mizrahi and the politics and practices surrounding Greek music in Israel, as well as in the Romaniot Jewish community of Ioannina. Her interests revolve around the anthropology of music, issues related to nationalism and sovereignty, the politics of culture and affect around popular music, artistic labour, cultural racism and legacies of national purity. Her theoretical perspective includes questions related to the pertinence of post-colonial critique for Romani studies, as well as for the understanding of Mizrahi subjectivities in the Israeli state.

Georgia Vavva is an ethnomusicologist with a background in music and anthropology. She holds a BA in Music Studies (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens) and an MA in Social Anthropology with Distinction (Queen’s University Belfast). In 2019 she completed her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology in Royal Holloway, University of London, funded by the Crossland Research Scholarship. Her research concerns music and the economic crisis in Greece with a particular focus on the Athenian jazz scene in the post-2010 period. She specializes on music and globalization, the politics of value, urban music cultures and change, and the ethnography of the economic crisis in the Mediterranean. In 2015 she worked as a research assistant for the research project “Western art music at the time of crisis” and carried out fieldwork in “The Music Village” in Ayios Lavrentios, Pelion.  The project was funded by the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs under the action “Aristeia II”. She has participated in various workshops and her work has been published at Polyphony and The Greek Review of Social Research. During the academic year 2022-2023 she was a Teaching Fellow at the Department of Culture, Creative Media and Industry – University of Thessaly.

Vassiliki Yiakoumaki teaches social anthropology at the Department of History-Archaeology-Social Anthropology, University of Thessaly (Volos), Greece. Her research interests focus on nationalism, ethnic groups and minorities, multiculturalist politics, Jewish cultures of Greece and Europe, religion and the public sphere, and practices of contemporary religiosity. Her current research field is Israel, i.e., contemporary Israeli society, and Greek-Israeli Jewry. She has conducted research on perceptions of Greek identity in present-day Greek-Israelis, as well as on Greek music in Israel.