Dr Rebecca Draisey-Collishaw

I started my career in music as a performer, studying oboe and gigging with regional orchestras in Canada. My long standing interests in how people learn, form communities, and participate in music making brought me back to higher education and studies in ethnomusicology. 

While completing a Master’s degree in performance at Western University in London, Canada, I also pursued research that explored the ways that Irish immigrants in Canada use music to maintain connections to home and build new communities that reach across cultural lines. 

I went on to complete a doctorate in ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, Canada. Here, my research focused on public broadcasting in multicultural contexts. Through case studies of radio programming that staged intercultural encounters between musicians, my research explored the relationships between performers, broadcasters, and audiences, and how curated musical experiences interact with notions of citizenship. I continued this work with the support of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship, which I held at Queen’s University from 2019-2020.

My professional practice as an ethnomusicologist includes curatorial work with the Irish Traditional Music Archive (Dublin, IE) and the National Science and Media Museum (Bradford, UK) – in both cases using a variety of digital tools to preserve and bring to life special archival collections.

I joined the staff at University of Sheffield in 2022 as a Teacher in Ethnomusicology and the Director of University of Sheffield’s distance learning MA in Traditional and World Music in 2022. In 2023 I became a Research Associate on the Access Folk project.