Dr. Adriana Helbig received her BA in German Studies and Music (1997) from Drew University and her MA (1999), MPhil (2001), and PhD (2005) in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University. Before joining the University of Pittsburgh faculty in 2008, she taught at Columbia University, Fordham University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Dr. Helbig is an Associate Professor of Music and served as the Chair of the Department of Music (2020-2023). She was the Assistant Dean of Undergraduates (2015-2018) for Academic Integrity and the Humanities and served as the Undergraduate Advisor in the Department of Music (2014-2018).
Dr. Helbig has held many elected positions within the University of Pittsburgh, including the Humanities Council, the Dietrich School Council, the Dietrich School Undergraduate Council, the Faculty Assembly and Senate, the Provost’s and Dietrich School’s Budget and Planning Committees, and a variety of appointments associated with the Center for Russian and East European Studies, the Department of Education Title VI Center, with which her research interests on music and human rights most closely align. She is currently a Member of the Board of the Shevchenko Scientific Society and is a past Member of the Board of the Society for Ethnomusicology (2020-2022).
Dr. Helbig was an inaugural Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh’s Humanities Center (2009) and an Honors College Faculty Fellow (2015-2018). She is a past recipient of fellowships from Fulbright, the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Councils for International Education, International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX), the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She has an international reputation as an applied ethnomusicologist and a scholar who advances discourses in Critical Race Studies, Critical Prison Studies (Pitt Prison Education Project), Development Studies, Minority and Migration Studies (Romani Music and Human Rights in Eastern Europe), Working-Class Studies, and Global Hip Hop Studies. Dr. Helbig’s books include Culture and Customs of Ukraine, co-authored with Oksana Buranbaeva and Vlada Madineo (Greenwood Press, 2009), Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration (Indiana University Press, 2014), Hip Hop at Europe’s Edge: Music, Agency, and Social Change, co-edited with Milosz Miszczynski (Indiana University Press, 2017), and ReSounding Poverty: Romani Music and Development Aid (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Dr. Helbig has produced undergraduate-focused public content about the role of music in the war.
Books
2023. ReSounding Poverty: Romani Music and Development Aid. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
2017. At Europe’s Edge: Music, Agency, and Social Change. Edited by Adriana Helbig and Milosz Miszczynski. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
2014. Hip-Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
2009. Helbig, Adriana, Oksana Buranbaeva and Vanja Mladineo. Culture and Customs of Ukraine. Westwood, CT: Greenwood Press.
Articles
Forthcoming “Romani Music in War-Time Ukraine” Music & Minorities
Forthcoming “Ukraine” Global Hip Hop Studies 3.1: The Hip Hop Atlas Sina Nitzsche and Greg Schick, guest editors.
2022 “Ukraine’s War-Time Pianos and the Sounds of Resistance.” Musicology Now (online).
2022 “Ромський _музичний _активізм _в _Україні _під _час _російської _окупації _2022” [Romani Musical Activism in Ukraine Under Russian Occupation 2022. Проблеми _Етномузикології _Issues in Ethnomusicology 17: 41-43.
2019 “Morals and Money: Economic Anxieties and Roma Realities in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine” Krytyka Ukrainian Studies Journal (April 2019 Online Issue)
2015 “Between Performance and Research: Thoughts on the Contributions of an East European Ensemble in an American University” Arti Musices - Croatian Musicological Review 46/2: 245-258.
2011 “‘On stage, everyone loves a Black’: Afro-Ukrainian Folk Fusion, Migration, and Post-Socialist Race Relations in Ukraine.” Current Musicology - Special Issue Post-Socialist Pop, Music, and Sound Cultures 91:7-24.
2011 “Brains, Means, and Lyrical Ammunition: Hip-Hop as Empowerment Among African Students in Kharkiv, Ukraine.” Popular Music 30(3):315-330. 2009 “‘All Connected Through the Gypsy Part of Town:’ The Gypsification of East European Immigrant Identity in U.S. Gypsy Punk Music” Romano Dzaniben (Jevend 2009): 85-101.
2009 “Managing Musical Diversity within Frameworks of Western Development Aid: Views from Ukraine, Georgia, and Bosnia and 3 Herzegovina” (With contributions from Nino Tsitsishvili and Erica Haskell) Yearbook for Traditional Music 40: 46-59.
2007 “Ethnomusicology and Advocacy Research: Theory in Action among Romani NGOs in Ukraine.” Anthropology of East Europe Review: Special Issue on Roma and Gadje 25(2): 78-83. 2006 “The Cyberpolitics of Music in Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution.” Current Musicology 82: 81-101.
Book Chapters
Forthcoming “Lament as Protest: Music, Memory and Mourning in War-Torn Ukraine.” In The Oxford Handbook on Protest Music, edited by Eric Drott and Noriko Manabe. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
2021 “The Piano and the Performing Body in the Music of Arvo Pärt: Phenomenological Perspectives” Co-authored with Maria Cizmic. In Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred, edited by Jeffers Engelhardt. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.
2019 “From Tsar Nikolai, Go F*ck Your Mother to “Putin, Go F*ck Yourself”: Musical Humor in Oppressive Regimes.” In Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Comedy, edited by Nicholas Baxter-Moore and Thomas Kitts. 354-360. New York, NY: Routledge.
2014 “Ivana Kupala (St. John’s Eve) Revivals as Metaphors of Fertility and Contemporary Ukrainian Femininity”. In The Oxford Handbook on Music Revivals, edited by Caroline Bithell and Juniper Hill, 510-529. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
2013 “Sports, and Music.” in Music in American Life: An Encyclopedia of the Songs, Styles, Stars, and Stories that Shaped our Culture, edited by Jacqueline Edmondson, 1096-1104. Greenwood Press.
2012 Ukraine.” In The International Recording Industries, edited by Lee Marshall, 192-206. Abington: Routledge.
2010. “The Dialogics of Development: NGOs, Ethnopolitics, and Roma in Ukraine” In Orange Revolution and Aftermath: Mobilization, Apathy, and the State in Ukraine, edited by Paul D’Anieri, 254-273. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars/ John Hopkins University Press.
2009. “Representation and Intracultural Dynamics: Romani Musicians and Cultural Rights Discourse in Ukraine.” In Music and Cultural Rights, edited by Andrew Weintraub and Bell Yung, 269-295. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
My book ReSounding Poverty: Romani Music and Development Aid (Oxford University Press, 2023) reflects on my work as an activist-researcher, educator, musician, and author devoted to issues of equality and justice. ReSounding Poverty synthesizes my 20 years as an ethnographer working on Romani music, culture, and human rights in Central and Eastern Europe. The book engages with global scholarship on development, poverty, and applied research. It addresses the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) within postsocialist neoliberal processes and analyzes the economic structures within which Romani music circulates. Specifically, ReSounding Poverty offers a micro ethnography of financial networks that impact the daily lives of Romani musicians on the borders of the former Soviet Union and the European Union. It argues that the development aid allotted to provide economic assistance to Romani communities, when analyzed from the perspective of the performance arts, continues to marginalize the poorest among them. Through their structure and programming, NGOs choose which segments of the population are the most vulnerable and in the greatest need of assistance. Drawing on ethnographic research in development contexts, ReSounding Poverty asks who speaks for whom within the Romani rights movement today. Framing the critique of development aid in musical terms, it engages with Romani marginalization and economic deprivation through a closer listening to vocal inflections, physical vocalizations of health and disease, and emotional affect. ReSounding Poverty brings us into the back rooms of saman, mud and straw brick, houses not visited by media reporters and politicians, amplifying the cultural expressions of the Romani poor, silenced in the development business.
During my sabbatical in 2018-2019, supported by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, I completed the Inside-Out training program required to teach in a U.S. maximum-security prison. My prison-based experiences build on my race and hip hop research in Eastern Europe. In my book Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration (Indiana University Press, 2014), I analyzed the legacies of Soviet race-based policies in contemporary Ukraine. Hip Hop Ukraine stems from long-term research among Ukrainian and African musicians in Ukraine and Uganda. The book incorporates ethnomusicological and ethnographic studies in the growing research on migrants in Ukraine, which, until Russia’s 2022 invasion, received the fourth-largest number of migrants after the United States, Canada, and the Russian Federation. In addition, the book was the first ethnographic account of African musicians in a postsocialist society and laid the foundation for African activists in Ukraine to promote Africa-centered cultural activities, especially in Kharkiv and Kyiv.
This book set the stage for further research on hip hop in Eastern Europe. Hip Hop At Europe’s Edge: Music, Agency, and Social Change (Indiana University Press, 2017), which I co-edited with Polish hip hop scholar Milosz Miszczynski, features ethnographic research on hip hop from the Baltic states, the Balkans, Central Europe, and the former Soviet Union. Hip Hop At Europe’s Edge features 17 chapters written by scholars in Eastern Europe on hip hop’s role in social movements, politics, and identity negotiations. Despite its regional focus, the volume synthesizes various postsocialist experiences. Almost 30 years after socialism’s collapse, the former Eastern Bloc countries are as dissimilar as ever. Since 1991, there has been a war in the Balkans. Czechoslovakia has split into two countries—the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania have entered the European Union. Russia has used military violence against Georgia and Ukraine. Thus, while the edited volume offers country-based analyses of hip hop histories in Eastern Europe, it does so concerning the complex historical, economic, social, and political realities that determined how hip hop has been appropriated and where, why, and by whom it is deemed a source of agency and identity.
In my teaching, I draw student attention to the relationship between music, politics, and cultural rights. Interests in social equality and global consciousness guide course topics. I welcome working with students interested in all genres of music who wish to use scholarship for positive social change.
