
Polina Dessiatnitchenko is Assistant Professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. Her research focuses on mugham, a branch of traditional Azerbaijani music. She explores how musical creativity is a decolonizing practice suffused with affect.
Specifically, she examines how affect is conveyed in sung poetry, discussed fervently by classical musicians, and experienced intensely in performances, becoming a force that delineates emerging subjectivities in independent Azerbaijan. Her research interests include Azerbaijanitar, phenomenology, affect theory, ghazal poetry, aruz, Islamic aesthetics, Soviet and post-Soviet studies, postcolonial studies, popular music, and media studies. Polina is also a performer on the Azerbaijani tar, having studied as an apprentice in major tar lineages in Baku for a total of six years. Her applied work includes performance and recording projects with musicians in Azerbaijan.
Polina received her bachelor’s degree in anthropology and music, as well as direct-entry PhD degree in ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto, where she was awarded the Garfield Weston Fellowship and Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Doctoral Graduate Scholarship for her research projects. Before joining Waseda University, Polina was working on her first monograph while holding a Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University’s Department of Music. Her articles have been published in Ethnomusicology Forum (2018), Ethnomusicology (2022), Asian Music (2022), Ethnomusicology Translations (2023) and Yale Journal of Music and Religion (2024). In addition to her current teaching at Waseda University, she designed and taught her own courses at the University of Toronto, Tufts University, and Doshisha University. Here is Polina Dessiatnitchenko’s personal website: https://polinadessi.com