Ioanida Costache

Ioanida Costache is an assistant professor of ethnomusicology in the Department of Music at Stanford University and an affiliate of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University.

Her work explores the legacies of Romani historical trauma, and the feminist critiques of the present, inscribed in Romani music, sound, and art. Her writing has been published in EuropeNow, RevistaARTA, Critical Romani Studies, and is forthcoming in European History Quarterly. Her research has been supported by two Fulbright Grants and the Council of European Studies. She has held visiting and postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the USC Shoah Foundation.

Her book project, Hearing Romani-ness, examines how music structures the political and social belonging of Romani peoples in ways that reify and work against processes of identity formation and racialization. Through an ethnographic focus on Romani musicians, the project shows how intergenerational memory of Romani trauma is discreetly imbedded in sonic expressions of sorrow within a bounded repertoire that in being kept private served as a vehicle for Romani collective healing. The book puts forth a new framework for navigating how sound, when heard as affective expression, can be used for reparative purposes in the wake of persecution, while also offering an interpretive and analytic vocabulary for learning to listen for the Roma.