Nicolás Aguía is a composer from Bogotá, Colombia. He is a PhD student in Latin American Cultural and Literary Studies. Ensembles and performers such as Sonia Diaz, the JACK Quartet, TAK Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, Loadbang, Duo Cortona, Duo Jacarandá, Bearthoven, and Sonic Apricity have performed his music in the United States, Italy, and Colombia. In August 2021, the Orfeo Choir from Bogotá premiered an evening-length work titled “The American Poetry Choral Cabaret”, collaborating with transdisciplinary artist Alfonso José Venegas. It is a choral song cycle and performative art piece that sets texts of different American poets from the 18th and 19th centuries, including Walt Whitman, Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Frances Ellen Watkins. “The American Poetry Choral Cabaret” won the Small Grants Project sponsored by the United States Embassy in Colombia. He received the “Premio Especial” for his String Quartet “Melismas Espectrales” in the Second-String Quartet National Composition Competition of Colombia, in 2020; and the 2022 Winner of the William Thomas McKinley Alumni Commission.

His areas of specialization include Continental and Latin American Philosophy, Mimetic Theory and Violence, Music and Memory, and Andean Literature. He has presented his work in musicology, philosophy, literature, ethnomusicology, and cultural studies conferences. He is currently working on the emergence of social movements in the Andes and the Colombian Caribbean region through literary processes of subjectivization in Peruvian and Colombian novels from the 19th and 20th centuries. This ongoing project uses René Girard's mimetic theory to reflect on the intersubjective dynamics of socio-economical structures and the problem of primitive accumulation. In 2024, he received the 2nd place for the Raymund Schwager Award given by the Colloquium on Violence and Religion for the paper: "Mimetic Images of Conflict and Accumulation: Negative Reciprocity in José
Maria Arguedas’ Every Blood." And most recently, the 2024 Graduate Student Research Award of the North Central Council of Latin Americanists (NCCLA) for the paper "La inmunización del autoritarismo en Chile: populismo y destierro de lo político." A comparative analysis of the work of Joaquin Brunner and Ernesto Laclau.

Publications:

Aguía Betancourt, N. (2022). Necropolítica en Chambacú, corral de negros de Manuel Zapata Olivella. Cuadernos de Literatura del Caribe e Hispanoamérica, (36), 53-76. https://doi.org/10.15648/cl..36.2022.3849

Aguía Betancourt, N. (2021). La danza de la tierra: el material musical, rito y sacrificio en La consagración de la primavera de Igor Stravinsky. Ricercare, (14), 97–115. https://doi.org/10.17230/ricercare.2021.14.5

Aguia, N. (2020). Santa Fé Oratorio: Voicing Alterity by Decolonizing Gender Frameworks in Bogotá. SEM (Student Newsletter), 16, (1).

Camargo Acosta, C., Prado González, C., Aguía Betancourt, N., & Roa Ordoñez, H. (2017). Tendencias Actuales de la Creación Académica de la Música Andina Colombiana. Bogotá: Fondo de Publicaciones Universidad Sergio