Dr. Colin Quigley is Course Director and Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at University of Limerick as well as Emeritus Professor World Arts and Cultures, University of California Los Angeles. His interdisciplinary doctorate combined Folkloristics, Ethnomusicology, and Ethnochoreology (Dance Ethnology). His research interests are located at the intersection of these disciplinary perspectives on research questions and problems by combining their theory and methods. Broad topics of particular interest include the investigation of tradition as generative process, the interaction of collectivity and individuality in traditional expressive culture, and intersections among nation, state, ethnicity, and the performance of tradition. His subject matter has included music, song, and dance in European and European-American traditions. He has published on a variety of genres as found in Newfoundland, Canada: Close to the Floor (1985) examined the traditional dancing of the province's small fishing communities, Music from the Heart (1995), the creative process of an outstanding French-Newfoundland fiddler. He began work in east-central Europe following 1989 and curated the 1999 Smithsonian Institution Folklife Festival Gateways to Romania' exhibit. While on a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship he investigated the inter-ethnicity of dance and dance music in Transylvania. Field recordings from this project are incorporated, along with extensive annotation, in the Indiana University EVIA Digital Archive [www.eviada.org]. His publications in this area of study include several on contemporary processes of revival, including 'The Hungarian Dance House Movement and Revival of Transylvanian String Band Music in The Oxford Handbook of Music Revivals (2014), 'Confronting Legacies of Ethnic-National Discourse in Scholarship and Practice: Traditional Music and Dance in Transylvania' Journal of Folklore Research (2016), and 'Táncház revival és a vonós zenekarok muzikája Közép-Erdélyben' in "Meg kell a búzúnak érni": A magzar táncházmozgalom 40 éve (2012). He is currently editing the (Oxford) Handbook of Ethnomusicology. Links to a variety of publications and conference contributions can be found at www.academia.edu, along with a curriculum vitae citing work published in such journals as Ethnomusicology and the Yearbook for Traditional Music. Colin worked for two years in Budapest observing its lively traditional and world music scene before moving to Ireland in 2008. He is a former Chair of the Irish Music Study Group of the Society for Ethnomusicology and Founding Editor of Ethnomusicology Ireland, the journal of the Irish National Committee of the International Council for Traditional Music [www.ictm.ie]. A fiddler and banjo player himself, he offers master classes and workshops in the fiddling and dancing of Newfoundland and the American South-East.
Research Interests
Dr. Quigley's research interests lie at the intersection(s) of ethnomusicology, ethnochoreology, and folkloristics. He has had a specific focus on vernacular and traditional dance and instrumental music and adopts a choreomusical focus in their investigation; that is, he emphasises their formal relationships and processual interactions performance. This research perspective is brought to bear on questions of ethnic, national, local, and international identity production in particular. He has conducted long-term field-based studies of vernacular fiddle and dance around the North Atlantic Rim, publishing seminal work concerning these topics in Newfoundland, Canada; racial, regional, and national histories have been the focus of inquiry. Since 1990 he has worked in East Central Europe and carried out long-term fieldwork in Transylvania. In this setting it is the multiple ethnic-national relationships among Romanian, Hungarian, and Roma populations and their choreomusical practices that are at stake.
