Ioannis Tsekouras holds a PhD in music anthropology (ethnomusicology) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His doctoral dissertation, titled “Nostalgia, Emotionality, and Ethnoregionalism in Pontic Parakathi Singing,” addresses the relationship between musical performance and discourses of collective identity through Pontic muhabeti or parakathi. Specifically, the thesis examines the negotiation of representations and discourses of collective Pontic memory, subjectivity, empathy and affectivity in the practices of social assembly and dialogical and participatory singing that define Pontic parakathi. The thesis is the result of a long field research funded by the University of Bologna (Tulia Magrini Prize), the Evxino Club of Thessaloniki, the Cultural and Folklore Association Argonauts-Komnenoi (Deligiorgi Prize) and the University of Athens (Department of Music Studies). His fields of interest and research include issues of ethnic and national identity and collective memory, musical feeling, empathy and emotional manifestations of the sonic aphant, cultural essentializations and representations of the voiceless voice and timbre, the anthropology of sound in general, and issues of community and music politics. Tsekouras specializes in the music of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans, especially the music of Greece and Turkey through the particular case of the Black Sea and Pontus.