Ilias Chrissochoidis, Ph.D. is a scholar, author, composer and pianist. He holds academic and professional degrees in piano performance, music theory, and Musicology from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Macedonian Conservatory of Thessaloniki, and two Master’s in Historical Musicology from the University of Liverpool and King’s College London. He received his Ph.D. in Music from Stanford University with the highest distinction in the School of Humanities and Sciences (Geballe Dissertation Prize). He has been teaching in the same institution since 1997.
In 2010-11, he was appointed Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, was a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, and a visiting research fellow at Harvard and McGill universities. In 2009, he became the first musicologist to be hired at an Economics department (University College London). As a Research Associate at the Center for Economic Learning and Social Evolution, he engaged in innovative research on game theory applications in Wagner’s operas.
A leading expert on Handel and the Greek composer Nikos Astrinidis, Chrissochoidis has received over 30 grants and fellowships from world-class universities and research centers (Stanford, Harvard, Yale, UCLA, UT-Austin, the Huntington, Folger Shakespeare Library, University of London), professional societies (American Handel Society, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies), private foundations (Onassis, Michelis, Rotary), and the Greek state (IKY, Ministry of Education, Academy of Athens). He has authored more than 50 research articles and essays, which can be found in leading musicological journals, and has received 47 invitations for presentations in the USA, the UK, Greece, and elsewhere. In recognition of his musicological activity, the Academy of Athens awarded him a special commendation in 2005 and Who’sWho in America has listed him in two of its editions (2004, 2005).
As an author, Chrissochoidis has written six non-academic books in Greek and has published dozens of articles on educational, social, and political issues in the Stanford Daily, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and in the Greek newspapers Ta Nea, Kathimerini, Sunday Vima, and Vima Ideon. Composing music since his teens, he has written extensively for the piano, regularly drawing from Greek folklore, and performs upon request.