ICTM Ireland Committee
Dr. Orfhlaith Ní Bhriain
Chair
Orfhlaith Ni Bhriain lectures on the BA in Irish Music and Dance at the Irish World Academy. She is a registered Irish Dance teacher T.C.R.G. and adjudicator A.D.C.R.G. with An Coimisiún le Rinci Gaelacha. She has travelled extensively to workshops and Step Dance Competitions throughout Europe and North America as a tutor from the renowned Scoil Rince Ui Ruairc and dance accompanist.
In 1998 she completed a Masters in Ethnochoreology at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick. Orfhlaith recently completed her doctoral thesis at the University of Limerick. Her research interests include, Irish Dance among the Diaspora and examining creative processes in the context of Competitive Irish Solo Step Dance.
Orfhlaith completed a residency at Williams College MA where she was employed as guest artist in dance. During her residency there, she also gave workshops in Irish dance at the American Colleges Dance Festival. Orfhlaith has also worked as assistant lecturer in Dance in the Physical Education Department, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick.
Orfhlaith is a former Co-Director of Blas International Summer School of Traditional Irish Music and Dance held at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance and is Dance Co-ordinator on the BA programme. She is also currently vice-chair person of Dance Research Forum Ireland.
Cuireann sí spéis freisin in imeachtaí a bhaineann leis an nGaeilge agus I ngach gné de chultúr na hÉireann.
Dr. Jaime Jones
Secretary
Jaime Jones is Lecturer in Ethnomusicology in the School of Music, University College Dublin, and her research centres on the musical traditions of South Asia. Before turning to the study of ethnomusicology, she trained as a pianist and composer at the Hartt School of Music and Sarah Lawrence College. She completed a Masters in Composition at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and had works performed in Amherst, New York, Chicago, and the Aspen Music Festival.
Jaime earned her PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago in 2009. Her doctoral research, for which she received a Fulbright grant, was based on two years of fieldwork in Maharashtra, India, where she worked closely with musicians of the Varkari devotional tradition. Her thesis examined ritual genres of Hinduism, and focused on the ways in which the aesthetic systems of these genres inscribe devotional efficacy, identity, and cultural resonance within the larger context of a changing Indian modernity, sustaining questions regarding the role of performance in the sacred by looking at how and why musical practice and worship coincide.
In UCD, Jaime teaches modules on world musics, ethnomusicology, Indian music, popular music, music and religion, and film music.
Michael Hackett
Membership Officer
From Dublin, singer and bodhrán player Michael Hackett is a 2010 graduate of the Irish World Academy’s BA in Irish Traditional Music and Dance. In 2011, under the supervision of Colin Quigley PhD Michael completed his MA in ethnomusicology, his MA thesis titled, “Singing Our Place: Local Songs and the Performance of Place in Irish Balladry” which focuses on the phenomenon of the social singing session common in Ireland. The thesis investigates the processes by which local cultural identities are created and performed by singers and songmakers who regularly engage in the activity of social singing.
Michael has taught Singing and Bodhrán at the Irish world Academy and lectures on social singing he has appeared on Irish Television and Radio. He is a regular performer at signing festivals in Ireland, Europe and the US. Michael recently embarked upon preliminary PhD research into the cultural, historical, geographical and social significance of community sports songs; locally composed songs which celebrate and commemorate the successes of local parish and county teams who regularly compete in the indigenous Irish sports of Hurling, Gaelic Football and Handball.
Dr. Daithí Kearney
Treasurer
Ethnomusicologist, geographer and performer Dr Daithí Kearney is a lecturer in Music at Dundalk Institute of Technology. His research is primarily focused on Irish traditional music but extends to include performance studies, community music, music education and the connection between music and place.
A graduate of University College Cork and a Government of Ireland scholar (IRCHSS), his PhD thesis concentrated on the construction of geographies and regional identities in Irish traditional music. His research interests include the negotiation, mediation and construction of identities through music and the relationship between music and place.
Daithí has toured regularly as a musician, singer and dancer with a number of groups including Siamsa Tíre, The National Folk Theatre of Ireland and was Artistic Director of the The Cork International Folk Dance Festival 2005. An All-Ireland champion musician, he has recorded with a number of ensembles his compositions feature on these recordings. In 2009 he performed for President Obama in The White House for St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. In 2012 he released an album with Cork accordion player John Cronin which is related to a wider research project on the music and musicians of the Sliabh Luachra region.
As well as lecturing in DkIT, Daithí regularly contributes to courses at University College Cork, is an examiner with London College of Music and has also worked in Primary and Second level education. He teaches with Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann and continues to provide masterclasses on banjo, group performance and the history of Irish traditional music.
Dr. Ioannis Tsioulakis
Communications Officer
Ioannis Tsioulakis is a Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at University College Cork. He completed his undergraduate studies in the Department of Music Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Following this, Ioannis specialised in ethnomusicology and social anthropology, completing his MA (2006) and PhD (2011) at Queen’s University Belfast.
Ioannis’s doctoral thesis, entitled ‘Working or Playing? Power, Aesthetics and Cosmopolitanism among Professional Musicians in Athens’, concentrates on the diverse socio-cultural worlds of music-making in the Greek capital. His particular focus was 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. More specifically, Ioannis’s doctoral dissertation elaborated on the dichotomy between ‘work’ and ‘play’ and its role as a conceptual framework for the experience of professional musicking in Athens.
Ioannis has also worked as a piano and music theory teacher in Greece and the UK, and has been extensively involved in the professional Athenian music scene as a performer, arranger and composer, specialising in Greek popular music and jazz.
Sheryl Lynch
Education Officer
Sheryl’s research interests include the music of North West Cameroon and musical identities in the diasporic context. In 2009, Sheryl co-edited The Musicology Review, the only postgraduate journal dedicated to musicology in Ireland. She currently tutors in UCD and is a part-time ethnomusicology lecturer in St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra.
In addition to teaching music in a community youth project, Sheryl continues to work as a performer and has played the clarinet in a variety of musical groups including the UCD Symphony Orchestra, Engine Room Orchestra and the new music ensemble, NODE.
Sheryl drums with the Afro-Caribbean Society and is currently studying for the PhD under the supervision of Dr. Jaime Jones.
