Maria Sonevytsky
Professional affiliation
Wilson Center Projects
Thank You, Comrade Stalin, For Our Happy Childhood!: A Study of Children's Music in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
Full Biography
Maria Sonevytsky is an assistant professor at Bard College. She completed her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at Columbia University in 2012, and wrote a dissertation based on intensive fieldwork in Crimea and Western Ukraine. Recent works include an article in the Journal of Popular Music Studies titled “The Freak-Cabaret on the Revolution Stage: On the Ambivalent Politics of Femininity, Rurality, and Nationalism in Ukrainian Popular Music” (2016), and the “Chornobyl Songs Project” (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 2015). Her book Wild Music: Sovereign Imaginaries and Popular Music in Post-Soviet Revolutionary Ukraine is forthcoming. In 2018, she will join the ethnomusicology faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.
Major Publications
1. 2016. “The Freak Cabaret on the Revolution Stage: On the Ambivalent Politics of Femininity, Rurality, and Nationalism in Ukrainian Popular Music.” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 28.3, pp. 291-314.
2. 2016. “Late Soviet Discourses of ‘Nature’ and the Natural: Musical Avtentyka, Native Faith and ‘Cultural Ecology’ after Chornobyl.” Current Directions in Ecomusicology (eds. Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe). London and New York: Routledge, pp. 135-146. Co-authored with Adrian Ivakhiv.
3. 2015. “Chornobyl Songs Project: Living Culture from a Lost World.” Smithsonian Folkways, SFW CD 50420.
2016. “The Freak Cabaret on the Revolution Stage: On the Ambivalent Politics of Femininity, Rurality, and Nationalism in Ukrainian Popular Music.” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 28.3, pp. 291-314.