Dipl.-Mus.-Päd. Olga ZAITSEVA-HERZ, B.Sc. BA M.Sc.
(Guest Researcher)
Email: zaitseva-herz@mdw.ac.at
Olga Zaitseva-Herz is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology in the Department of Music at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada) and a research assistant at the Kule Folklore Centre. Olga's research studies the multimodal reflection of hybridity in Ukrainian Canadians' immigrant vernacular song repertoire. The study builds on a fieldwork collection of Ukrainian Canadian folk songs collected by R. Klymasz in the 1960s on the prairies of the rural regions of western Canada, where most of the first-wave Ukrainian immigrants lived. With this research, she investigates deeper multimodal layers of hybridity in folk songs. It is expected that this study will contribute to the scholarship by reinforcing and expanding on the insights into the vernacular diaspora song traditions.
As a guest researcher at the Music and Minorities Research Center (MMRC), Olga will be studying Ukrainian folk songs in Austrian archives. The repositories of the Viennese archives will contribute to the body of the repertoire corpus of Olga's research on vernacular Ukrainian folk songs with Austrian exemplars from the pre-migrational times of the Ukrainian communities in Canada.
Olga is a Ukrainian cultural activist and performer with extensive international experience. In addition to communicating her research findings in traditional academic venues, she presents them in the form of performances with her music project ZAITSA. In 2012 the band produced its first EP for an appearance at the Mela Festival associated with the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London; her album was nominated and shortlisted for the Edmonton Music Prize 2018. One of ZAITSA´s project's goals is to promote the multifacetedness and richness of the Ukrainian song repertoires.
Olga is a recipient of multiple international awards such as the NTSh research grant 2019 (Canada), Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute scholarship HUSI 2019 (USA), Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship by the University of Alberta 2020 (Canada), OeAD Ernst Mach Worldwide Grant 2021 (Austria), Ottilie-Roederstein Scholarship 2022 by the Hessen State Ministry of Higher Education, Research and the Arts (Germany).
This project is funded by an Ernst Mach Worldwide Grant by OeAD.