Pavlos Kavouras
Seminar "Music as living cultural heritage"
Pavlos Kavouras is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Music Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA). In February 2023, he was appointed holder of the newly established UNESCO Chair at NKUA, titled “Anthropology of Traditional Music: Representing and Reconfiguring Intangible Cultural Heritage.”
His scholarly work brings together anthropology with sociology, musicology, history, philosophy, and cultural studies. He was the founder and director of the Laboratory of Ethnomusicology and Cultural Anthropology at NKUA (2007–2022). He has participated as principal or collaborating researcher in numerous international projects, contributing through lectures, teaching, ethnographic research, and various institutional collaborations related to the management of art and education.
Since 2016, he has been a visiting professor at UCLA (Department of Ethnomusicology), and in 2015, as a Greek Scholars Fellow of the Onassis Foundation, he delivered a series of lectures in the United States at the universities of California (UCLA), Stanford, Illinois, Michigan, and Harvard.
Since 2012, his academic, artistic, and philosophical interests have focused on migration and otherness within a broad geo-cultural perspective, using music and film as fields for understanding otherness and as vehicles for achieving self-awareness. Since 2020, he has been a founding member of the NKUA Center of Excellence on interreligious dialogue.
He has conducted extensive ethnographic research in Greece, the United States, Southwestern India, and Egypt. He has published numerous books and articles in both English and Greek, and serves as the scientific editor of the series “Ethnomusicological – Anthropological” published by Nissos Editions.