Polina Dessiatnichenko

Polina Dessiatnitchenko is an Assistant Professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, where she is teaching ethnomusicology, musicology, and anthropology courses. One of her most popular courses “Music and Culture Across the Silk Road” is focused on genres, styles, and instruments in the Silk Road region, and considers how music has been linked to issues of identity, power, and diplomacy. In addition to her current teaching at Waseda University, she designed and taught her own courses at the Doshisha University, Tufts University, and University of Toronto. Polina completed her PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto in 2017, where she was awarded the Garfield Weston Fellowship and Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Doctoral Graduate Scholarship for her doctoral research on Azerbaijani mugham. Polina has been working on her first monograph while holding a Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University’s Department of Music from 2018 until 2021. She also has an Associate Degree in Piano Performance from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Canada. Polina has article publications in Ethnomusicology Forum (2018), Ethnomusicology (2022), Asian Music (2022), Ethnomusicology Translations (2023), Yale Journal of Music & Religion (2024), IASPM (2024), and an invited book chapter in Trends in World Music Analysis (2022). Polina has presented her work at international conferences and academic institutions in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Australia, Portugal, Germany, Azerbaijan, Greece, and Ireland. Her research interests include Azerbaijani mugham, popular music, tar, creativity, phenomenology, affect theory, ghazal poetry, aruz prosodic meters, Islamic aesthetics, Soviet and post-Soviet studies, and postcolonial studies. Polina is also a performer on the Azerbaijani tar. She has been taking lessons with Vamig Mammadaliyev and Elkhan Mansurov in Azerbaijan since 2016. She has performed in Canada, Azerbaijan, and Japan, organizing solo concerts as well as performing with various ensembles such as the Toronto Silk Road Chamber Orchestra and the Ensemble of Ancient Musical Instruments in Azerbaijan.