Nicolás Aguía is a composer from Bogotá, Colombia, and a PhD student in Latin American Cultural and Literary Studies. His music has been performed by ensembles and performers, including Sonia Díaz, Roger Zahab, Robert Frankenberry, the JACK Quartet, TAK Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, Loadbang, Duo Cortona, Duo Jacarandá, Bearthoven, and Sonic Apricity, across the United States, Italy, and Colombia. In August 2021, the Orfeo Choir from Bogotá premiered his evening-length work The American Poetry Choral Cabaret, a collaboration with transdisciplinary artist Alfonso José Venegas. This choral song cycle and performative art piece sets texts by American poets from the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Walt Whitman, Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Frances Ellen Watkins. The American Poetry Choral Cabaret received the Small Grants Project award, sponsored by the United States Embassy in Colombia.

In 2020, Nicolás earned the Premio Especial for his string quartet Melismas Espectrales in Colombia's Second String Quartet National Composition Competition. He was also the 2022 recipient of the William Thomas McKinley Alumni Commission.

Nicolás specializes in areas such as Continental and Latin American Philosophy, Mimetic Theory and Violence, Music and Memory, and Latin American Literature. He has presented his research at conferences on musicology, philosophy, literature, ethnomusicology, and cultural studies. His current work explores the emergence of social movements in the Andes and the Colombian Caribbean region through the literary processes of subjectivization in 19th- and 20th-century Peruvian and Colombian novels. This ongoing project incorporates René Girard's mimetic theory to examine the intersubjective dynamics of socio-economic structures and the issue of primitive accumulation.

In 2024, Nicolás received second place for the Raymund Schwager Memorial Award, presented by the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, for his paper "Mimetic Images of Conflict and Accumulation: Negative Reciprocity in José María Arguedas’ Every Blood." That same year, he was honored with the Graduate Student Research Award from the North Central Council of Latin Americanists (NCCLA) for his paper "La inmunización del autoritarismo en Chile: populismo y destierro de lo político," a comparative analysis of the works of Joaquín Brunner and Ernesto Laclau.

Publications:

Betancourt, N. A. (2024). "Ahayu-Watan: Gamaliel Churata’s Ontogenetic Philosophy of Memory." Chasqui, 53(2), 259–275. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27339963

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