Ioannis Tsioulakis is Reader in Anthropology and Ethnomusicology, having joined the School in 2013. He has previously lectured in ethnomusicology at University College Cork and University College Dublin. Ioannis completed his undergraduate studies in the Department of Music Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Following this, he specialised in ethnomusicology and social anthropology, completing his MA (2006) and PhD (2011) at Queen’s University Belfast. Ioannis’s first monograph, Musicians in Crisis: Working and Playing in the Greek Popular Music Industry was published by Routledge in 2020. The book looks at the diverse socio-cultural worlds of music-making in the Greek capital with an emphasis on precarity and economic austerity. Ioannis's research has also focused on cosmopolitan aspirations among local music practitioners and the way that they affect social relations, markets of musical labour, and discourses of value and aesthetics in popular music.

     Ioannis is currently conducting research on the impact of Covid-19 on performing artists, with a number of publications and collaborative projects under development (a preliminary co-written piece with Dr Ali FitzGibbon can be found here and a piece for The Conversation here).

     Ioannis has also worked extensively as a professional musician (pianist, arranger and composer) and a music teacher (piano and music theory). He is a founding member of the Greek band Checkmate in Two Flats with whom he often records and performs in Greece and abroad

     Ioannis’s main research has focused on music professionalism and the impact of globalisationon Greek subcultures and their conceptions of musical creativity. His current research is concentrating on musical labour and precarity and the way that it shapes understandings of musical competence, aesthetics, and the social dynamics of local ‘scenes’.

Further research interests include:

• The concept of the ‘social imaginary’ and its relevance to processes of music eclecticism
• The ethnographic study of modalities of discursive resistance among music practitioners
• The relationship between economic/political crisis and ideas of transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and eclecticism within popular music-making in Greece and the wider Mediterranean
• Covid-19 and its impact on performing artists in Greece and Ireland

Undergraduate

Being Creative: Music, Media and the Arts (Level 1, Sem 2 - ESA1001)

Radical Musics: Understanding Sounds of Defiance across Disciplines (Level 2, Sem 1 - HAP2000)

Music and Identity in the Mediterranean (Level 3, Sem 2 – ESA3012)

Popular Music Cultures: From Billie Holiday to the Eurovision (Level 2, Sem 1 – ETH 2009)

Postgraduate

Anthropology of Music (MA Level, Sem 2 - ANT 7013)

Advanced Anthropological Perspectives (MA Level, Sem 1 - ANT 7008)

Advanced Anthropological Methods (MA Level, Sem 2 - ANT 7009)

Ensembles

Experimental World-Fusion Ensemble

Greek Music Ensemble

Topics of MA/PhD Supervision

• Popular/folk music and politics

• Creative industries, production and labour

• Performance and identity

• Globalisation, cosmopolitanism and social/political movements

• Aesthetics, genre and improvisation

Programme Convenor for Undergraduate Programmes in Anthropology