Maria Sonevytsky Appointed Assistant Professor at Bard College!

The Department of Music congratulates alumna Dr. Maria Sonevysky (PhD, Ethnomusicology, 2012).  Dr. Sonevytsky has been appointed as Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College, beginning in 2014.  Prior to taking up the position at Bard, Dr. Sonevysky will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Toronto for 2013-14.

Dr. Sonevytsky is currently a Mihaychuk Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She received her BA degree in Music from Barnard College, and her PhD in Music (Ethnomusicology) from Columbia University. Her  dissertation was entitled “Wild Music: Ideologies of Exoticism in Two Ukrainian Borderlands."  The dissertation develops comparative musical-ethnographic studies of two distinct Ukrainian borderland groups, the Hutsuls of the Carpathian Mountains, and the Crimean Tatars, and examines the role of discourses of "wildness" and exoticism in Ukrainian music, culture,  and politics.

In 2011, Dr. Sonevystky presented “The Chornobyl Songs Projects: Living Culture from a Lost World” that sought to broaden public awareness about the cultural impact of nuclear disaster by reviving ritual song repertoires from rural communities around Chornobyl that were dispersed after 1986. The project culminated with multi-media performances in four cities, and will result in a recording from Smithsonian Folkways in 2013. Sonevytsky is also an accomplished accordionist, as well as a vocalist and pianist. She performs with a composers’ collective in New York City called Anti-Social Music.