Information: Colin Quigley, teacher of Irish and European dance.

Dr. Colin Quigley, from Limerick, Ireland, is Course Director and Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the University of Limerick. His research interests are in European and European-American traditions of music and dance. He has published on both as found in Newfoundland, Canada. Close to the Floor (1985) examined the traditional dancing of the province’s small fishing communities, Music from the Heart (1995), the creative process of an outstanding French-Newfoundland fiddler.

He began work in east central Europe following 1989 and curated the 1999 Smithsonian Institution Folklife Festival "Gateways to Romania" exhibit. While on a Fulbright senior research fellowship in 1997-98, he investigated the inter-ethnicity of dance and dance music in Transylvania, Romania. Field recordings from this project are incorporated, along with extensive annotation, in the Indiana University EVIA Digital Archive. Links to some of his recent publications on this work can be found at Academia, along with a curriculum vitae citing earlier work published in such journals as Ethnomusicology and the Yearbook for Traditional Music. He was an associated member of the Section On Cultural & Social Anthropology of The Institute For Cultural Anthropology at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania. He also served as curator for the Romanian program in the 1999 Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

He taught in the Folklore Department of Memorial University, Newfoundland, and was a post-doctoral research fellow at its Centre d'Etudes Franco-Terreneuviennes.

Colin worked for two years in Budapest observing its lively traditional and world music scene before moving to Ireland in 2008. He is a contributor to Inbhear, the online journal for Irish music and Dance, the Chair of the Irish Music Study Group of the Stockholm Ethnography Museum, and General [founding] Editor of Ethnomusicology Ireland, the journal of the Irish National Committee of the International Council for Traditional Music.

A fiddler and banjo player himself, he offers master classes and workshops in the fiddling and dancing of Newfoundland and the American South-East. He taught and performed Anglo-, Celtic-, and Franco-American traditional music and dance throughout the United States and Canada. His monograph, Close to the Floor: Folk Dance in Newfoundland (1985), is an investigation of relationships between dance forms and dance events. Quigley's book, Music From the Heart (1995), examines the interplay of creativity and tradition in the composition of French Newfoundland fiddle music.

When professor Quigley was an Associate Professor of the World Arts and Cultures Department at the University of California at Los Angeles, he researched the inter-relationship of fiddle music and dance in Newfoundland and Eastern Europe. He was also affiliated with the Department of Ethnomusicology at the university. In "Dancing Bows and Musical Feet," he considered rhythm as the most defining characteristic of local and regional style in fiddling around the North Atlantic, and especially within Canada where so much melodic material is widely shared.

He investigated how changes in ideologies of national and ethnic identity affect folklore performance in post-communist Europe. Quigley received his doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles and his Master of Arts from Memorial University, Newfoundland.

Colin taught old and new American contras at an AMAN Institute in March of 1990.