Maria Sonevytsky

I am an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music at Bard College and am delighted to be Visiting the Department of Slavic Language & Literatures at Harvard University in the Fall of 2026. 

I am a scholar of Ukraine, with a particular interest in the intersection of musical culture and state and regional politics. My first book, Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine (2019), won the Lewis Lockwood First Book Award from the American Musicological Society in 2020. My second book, Vopli Vidopliassova’s Tantsi, examined the late Soviet Ukrainian punk band VV’s first cassette release. It appeared in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 Europe series in 2023, alongside the first official release of the album, which I facilitated, on the LA-based reissue label ORG Music. My current book project adopts a historical anthropological approach to the study of Soviet Ukrainian children’s musical culture at the Kyiv Palace of Pioneers. In tandem with this book project, I am building a digital archive for the Kyiv Palace of Children and Youth (the successor institution to the Kyiv Palace of Pioneers) with a team of collaborators. 

I have published over a dozen scholarly articles and book chapters in venues including The Slavic Review, Public Culture, Ethnomusicology, Music & Politics, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. Public-facing works, critical reviews, and multimedia projects have appeared in Triple Canopy, Pitchfork, the LA Review of Books, the London Ukrainian Review, and Smithsonian Folkways. I am also a practicing vocalist and accordionist, and am currently developing a new song cycle, BEREZA/BERYOZE, inspired by Yiddish- and Ukrainian-language vernacular song traditions, with my trio Zozulka. More at www.mariasonevytsky.com.