Farzaneh Hemmasi (Ph.D., Columbia University) is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at University of Toronto. Her monograph Tehrangeles Dreaming: Intimacy and Imagination in Southern California’s Iranian Pop Music (Duke University Press 2020) is an ethnographic account of the Los Angeles-based postrevolutionary Iranian expatriate culture industries. Prof. Hemmasi’s other publications consider the transnational circulation of political music and poetry between diaspora and homeland; Googoosh and the post-revolutionary political metaphorization of the Iranian female singing voice; and Iranian twentieth century “New Poetry” and popular music; these have appeared in the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2017), Popular Communication (2017), Popular Music (2017), Ethnomusicology (2013), and Mahoor Music Quarterly (2008). She has also contributed to two edited volumes, Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities (University of Hawaii Press, 2017) and Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater: Artistic Developments in the Muslim World (University of Texas Press, 2011). A Connaught Community Partnership Research grant and Insight Development Grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council fund her collaborative, community-engaged ethnographic research project on music, sound, affordability in Toronto’s Kensington Market neighbourhood. She also serves on the advisory board of San Francisco State University’s Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies.
Prof. Hemmasi teaches undergraduate courses on music and sound in the Middle East; North American popular music; contemporary celebrity; and music and social movements. Her graduate courses include Music and Circulation; Performing Politics; and Music and Sound in the Middle East; and Sound and Noise in Urban Environments. She advises doctoral research on music in diaspora, the Middle East, gender, religion, popular music, sound studies, and more.
For more information on her teaching and research, see Prof. Hemmasi’s personal website.