Farzaneh Hemmasi Appointed as Assistant Professor at U Toronto

The Center for Ethnomusicology and the PhD Prorgram in Ethnomusicology at Columbia warmly congratulate Dr. Farzaneh Hemmasi (PhD, 2010, Ethnomusicology), who has accepted an appointment as Assistant Professor of Music (tenure track) at The University of Toronto. Dr. Hemmasi is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania. 




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Dr. Hemmasi's dissertation was advised by Prof. Ana Maria Ochoa, and is entitled "Iranian Popular Music in Los Angeles: Mobilizing Media, Nation and Politics."  The dissertation is an ethnographic and historical study of the Iranian exile music industry that emerged in Southern California after popular music was banned in Iran following the 1978-79 Revolution. Drawing on interviews with musicians and media producers, Dr. Hemmasi's work demonstrates the many transformations Persian-language musiqi-ye pop has undergone since its inception in the 1950s from a symbol of cosmopolitan modernity, to a banned cultural form in the revolution, to a medium for exiles' aesthetic recombination and circulation of Iran.