the team

Ioannis Tsioulakis is Reader in Anthropology and Ethnomusicology at Queen’s University Belfast, which he joined 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. 

Since 2020, Ioannis has been conducting research on the impact of Covid-19 and other piling crises on performing artists, with a number of publications and collaborative projects released and more under development. A full list of publications can be found 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.