Do you know the team behind the Eurovisions International Conference?
Updated: Mar 28, 2025
Irving Wolther is addicted to the Eurovision Song Contest - not only since he published the world's first PhD thesis on the competition back in 2006 but since his early childhood when his French mother forced him to stay awake one Saturday night in May to cheer for "our" entry. The Curiosity for foreign popular cultures has guided his professional career and scholarly research, initiating in 2018 the first EUROVISIONS Conference with Sofia Vieira Lopes.
Sofia Vieira Lopes, PhD, researcher, musicologist and ethnomusicologist.
She grew up watching the Eurovision Song Contest and listening to the complaints about the Portuguese bad results. For several years, she did not even know if Eurovision still existed… but when she decided to do her PhD thesis, she found the Eurovision Song Contest alive and realized that it is one of the best subjects to understand social dynamics. In 2018, Irving and Sofia created the EUROVISIONS International Conference to gather in a healthy discussion those who make the ESC happen, those who are just interested in it, but also the others who think that don’t like it.
Carla Figueira is a lecturer, researcher, and consultant in cultural policy and management and international cultural relations. She is currently a Visiting Research and Knowledge Exchange Fellow at the Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, where, for a decade, she convened the MA in Cultural Policy, Relations and Diplomacy and the MA in Tourism and Cultural Policy. Carla is originally from Lisbon, Portugal, and she grew up watching the Eurovision Song Contest.
Isabel Campêlo
Singer, teacher of vocal practices and for the last fifteen years a music researcher with a PHD on Portuguese recording studios, Isabel Campelo has been associated to the ESC both as a music professional (1985) and as a researcher, when joining EUROVISIONS in 2020 (after having participated in the first conference in 2018 as an invited guest).
This relationship with the ESC went through various stages - watching it as a child, liking it, participating in it, not liking it, liking it again and since 2020 researching about it. A dynamic relationship, in tune with the ESC itself.
Wilfred van Dellen, MSc, graduated as a student in Educational Psychology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. He is an academic staff member at University College Maastricht (UCM). During the last 20 years at UCM, he has been a teacher, academic advisor, and coordinator of several courses, programme evaluations, academic advising, and the bachelor thesis programme. He has been a fan of the Eurovision Song Contest for decades, and the 2018 Eurovisions Conference in Lisbon triggered his interest in linking academia with the event. After the Netherlands won the contest in 2019, he joined the Eurovisions team as a local volunteer to prepare for the conference in 2020-2021 (online edition due to the pandemic). Ever since, he is expanding his academic interest and linking it to the contest, both in content and by networking with other academics (students and staff).
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