Olga Zaitseva-Herz

Olga Zaitseva-Herz (zaitseva@ualberta.ca) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Kule Folklore Centre and the University of Alberta (CA). She holds a PhD in Music from the University of Alberta, where her dissertation investigated the transcultural singing practices of Ukrainian emigrants from Galicia and Bukovyna to Canada at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Trained in violin performance and sound studies and media in Ukraine, and in vocal pedagogy in Germany, Zaitseva-Herz works at the intersection of musicology and ethnomusicology. Her research critically engages with themes of migration, cultural memory, identity formation, violent conflict, and displacement, drawing on archival recordings, oral histories, and ethnographic fieldwork. She conducts interdisciplinary projects on digital heritage preservation. In addition to her scholarly work, she is an active composer and performer. Her contemporary opera Bakhmut Rhapsody premiered at the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival in New York City in 2024.