Ioana Carina Cirtita

Ioana Carina Cirtita is a musicologist and pianist reading for a DPhil in Music at the University of Oxford. She holds a First Class BMus (Hons) from the University of Glasgow and an MA in Historically Informed Performance Practice (Piano) from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Her doctoral research focuses on Romanian piano music from 1933 to 1965, a transformative period marked by political upheaval and artistic innovation. She employs archival research, cultural-historical contextualisation, and musical analysis to examine performance practice traditions of Romanian piano repertoire while documenting the emergence of a distinctive national piano school.

As both a musicologist and pianist, she is passionate about the symbiotic relationship between these disciplines, performing the repertoire she researches in ways that allow each practice to deeply inform and enrich the other.

Her research is supervised by Professor Jonathan Cross and Dr. Maria Razumovskaya and supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership and St. Catherine's College's Light Senior Scholarship.