About the SPACE Team

 

Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland

Daithí Kearney - Lecturer in Music

Ethnomusicologist, geographer and performer Dr Daithí Kearney is a graduate of University College Cork and a lecturer in music and co-director of the Centre for Creative Arts Research at Dundalk Institute of Technology. His research is primarily focused on Irish traditional music but extends to include performance studies, community music, music education and the connection between music and place. His PhD concentrates on the construction of geographies and regional identities in Irish traditional music and his research interests include the negotiation, mediation and construction of identities through music and the relationship between music and place.

Daithí has toured regularly as a musician, singer and dancer with a number of groups including Siamsa Tíre, The National Folk Theatre of Ireland and was Artistic Director of the The Cork International Folk Dance Festival 2005. An All-Ireland champion musician, he has recorded with a number of ensembles including the band Nuada and performed for President Obama in The White House in 2009. In 2012 he released an album with Cork accordion player John Cronin entitled Midleton Rare,which is related to a wider research project on the music and musicians of the Sliabh Luachra region. He continues to tour regularly and in 2013 performed with Southbound at the National Folk Festival of Australia and in 2014 toured North and South America with the DkIT Ceol Oirghialla Traditional Music Ensemble. In 2016 he toured Scotland with the Ensemble and in 2017 they participated in the Rauland Winter Music Festival in Norway.

Recent publications include contributions to the Companion to Irish Traditional Music (ed. Vallely, 2012), Ancestral Imprints (Ed. Smith, 2012), the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (ed. White and Boydell, 2013), Spacing Ireland (Crowley and Linehan, 2013) and New Crops Old Fields (ed. Caldwell and Byers, 2016). He has also contributed to the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, Ethnomusicology Ireland, Sonss, Musicology Review, The Yearbook for Traditional Music, Popular Music and Estudios Irlandeses.

Daithí is formerly chair of ICTM Ireland and a committee member of the Society for Music Education in Ireland.