Dr Nicoletta Demetriou

Nicoletta Demetriou studied music in Thessaloniki (BA in Music Studies, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2002), Vienna (Postgraduate Seminars in Ethnomusicology, 2003), and London (PhD in Ethnomusicology, SOAS, University of London, 2008). She also studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, specializing in life writing (MA in Life Writing, 2012).

She worked as a teaching fellow in the Department of Music at SOAS (2008-11), as the Alistair Horne Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s College Oxford (2011-12), and as a research fellow in ethnomusicology and life writing at Wolfson College Oxford (2012-19). She taught Narrative Non-Fiction on the MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford (2012-19), and in 2018 was the programme’s acting director. 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 in Hellenic Studies at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. Between 2019 and 2022 she worked at the University of Cyprus as a Principal Investigator on DUEL, a Widening Fellowhip/Horizon 2020 programme sponsored by the European Commission. Since 2022 she has been directing CMA – Cyprus Music Archive, a non-profit organization founded by her.

She is co-editor of Music in Cyprus (Routledge, 2015), and author of The Cypriot Fiddler: The Oral History of a Professional Class in the Twentieth Century (in Greek; Psifides, Thessaloniki, 2022). Together with Larnaka Archives Phivos Stavrides, and with funding from the Deputy Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Cyprus, she has published a three-volume corpus on the improvised oral duels (tsiattista) performed at the festival of Kataklysmos in Larnaka between 1980 and 2019. A fourth volume that brings together the historical and theoretical part of the research will be published in 2025, also by Larnaka Archives Phivos Stavrides, and with funding from the Deputy Ministry of Culture. She is also the producer of two ethnographic documentaries: The Cypriot Fiddler (2022), and Poetic Duelling: New Tsiattista Poets in Cyprus (2025).

As a singer of Cypriot folk song, she has been performing with Michalis Terlikkas and his group Mousa for several years. She has also performed in the UK and the US, and has recorded Cypriot songs for the BBC (2010) and SOAS (2007). In 2021-22 she had the role of ‘female bard’ in Magdalena Zira’s play Dido/Elissa, singing verses she composed herself on traditional poetic forms, and set to pre-existing melodies. She will retake the same role in late 2024, for a new staging of the play in the theatre. 

For a full list of publications, see here.