Panayotis League

Panayotis (Paddy) League, Associate Professor of Musicology and Director of the Center for Music of the Americas, specializes in the traditional music of the Greek islands, northeastern Brazil, Ireland, and their respective diasporas, as well as instrumental rock music and the machines that make it possible. He holds the Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Harvard University, where he also served as the James A. Notopoulos Fellow in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature.

League’s research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Tsakopoulos Hellenic Collection at Sacramento State University, and his scholarship has been recognized with the Kealiinohomoku Award from the Society for Ethnomusicology and the Victor Papacosma and Vasili Karagianniaki Prizes from the Modern Greek Studies Association. He has published in Ethnomusicology, the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, the Journal of the Society for American Music, the Journal of Greek Media and Culture, the Harvard Review of Latin America, and several edited collections. His first monograph, Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-Sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora, published by University of Michigan Press, explores the legacy of Ottoman-era cosmopolitanism among musicians and dancers on the island of Lesvos and their migrant cousins in the United States. As a Fulbright Fellow in Brazil, he researched the history, playing techniques, and sociopolitical significance of the bisonoric button accordion in the local soundscape of the state of Paraíba, and is currently constructing an open-access website with short essays and transcriptions of the instrumental music composed by members of the Calixto clan of Campina Grande, PB. His forthcoming book, a materialist history of the bisonoric button accordion in Ireland, Brazil, and Greece, is under contract with SUNY Press with the title “Born Among the Buttons: Global Accordion Cultures in Motion.” He is also co-authoring “Choreographing New Identities,” a monograph on the Greek American folk dance and music revival, with anthropologist Anastasia Panagakos and essayist Joanna Eleftheriou, and co-editing “Greek Dance Ethnographies,” a collection of essays on folk and contemporary dance in Greece and the Greek world, with Christos Papakostas and Stacie Zambas Peroulas.

League is a member of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Modern Greek Studies Association, the American Folklore Society, the International Council for Traditional Music, the Associação Brasileira de Etnomusicologia, and the International Bagpipe Organization, and he sits on the SEM Council and the Executive Board of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. He formerly served as Managing Editor of Oral Tradition and is Chair and a founding member of the Modern Greek Studies Association’s Transnational Studies Committee.

An active performer, composer, and recording artist, League plays guitars, lutes, accordion, and percussion at venues around the world. In 2018 he was awarded a Traditional Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and in 2019 and 2021 was named a Master Artist by the Florida Folklife Program for his work performing and teaching the traditional music and oral poetry of Kalymnos and Kefallonia in the Greek immigrant community of Tarpon Springs. His album of original songs, Bedroom Volume, received a Bronze Medal in the Global Music Awards “Indie” category in 2025, and his collaboration with Athens, GA-based ensemble Hog-eyed Man was shortlisted for a Grammy in 2025. In 2026/2027, he will be releasing several new recordings of original music, including the collections of songs “One for the Worm” and “Colonial Boy” and an orchestral collaboration with composer Marc LeMay, “Sereias do Mar Mineiro.”

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