Farzaneh Hemmasi

Biography

Farzaneh Hemmasi (she/her) (Ph.D., Columbia University) is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at University of Toronto. Her award-winning 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. Tehrangeles Dreaming was the inaugural winner of the Hamid Naficy Book Award. 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).

Hemmasi’s secondary interest is using ethnographic methods and community-based research to address diversity, difference, and sound in Toronto. Since 2017, Farzaneh has undertaken a variety of collaborative ethnographic research projects on music, sound, and affordability in Toronto’s Kensington Market neighbourhood. Research topics include revisions to the Toronto noise policy; street festivals and economic / cultural “recovery” after the pandemic; and community-city partnerships to solve neighbourhood problems. This work has been funded by a Connaught Community Partnership Research grant; an Insight Development Grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research; University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute; the School of Cities and UofT’s Critical Digital Humanities Institute, among others. For more information on her teaching and research, see Prof. Hemmasi’s personal website.

Publications

Fieldwork as Fearwork: On Iranian Rock Music Performance-as-Research. Iran Amplified: One Hundred Years of Music and Society. ILEX. Forthcoming.

Tehrangeles Dreaming: Intimacy and Imagination in Southern California’s Iranian Pop Music. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

“Doing Our Essential Work.” MUSICultures, 49, 2022, 269-293.

“‘One Can Veil and Be a Singer!’ Performing Piety on an Iranian Talent Competition.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 3:13, Nov 2017, 416-437.
“Iran’s daughter and mother Iran: Googoosh and diasporic nostalgia for the Pahlavi modern.” Popular Music 36:2, 2017, 157-177.

“Rebuilding the Homeland in Poetry and Song: Simin Behbahani, Dariush Eghbali, and the Making of a Transnational National Anthem.” Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture 15:3, 2017, 192-206.

“Intimating Dissent: Poetry, Popular Music, and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Iran.” Winter 2013. Ethnomusicology 57:1, 57-87.

“Az Irāni tā jahāni: pāp-e fārsi zabān ru miyāyad.” (“From Iranian to ‘World’: Persian-Language Pop Crosses Over.”) Mahoor Music Quarterly 10:38, 2008, 36-50. (Iran’s preeminent peer-reviewed musicological journal, http://www.mahoor.ir)

“Googoosh’s Voice: An Iranian Icon in Silence and Song.” In Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities, edited by Andrew Weintraub and Bart Barendegt (University of Hawai’i Press), 2017, 234-257.

“Iranian Popular Music in Los Angeles: A Transnational Public beyond the Islamic State.” In Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater: Artistic Developments in the Muslim Cultural Sphere, edited by Karin Van Nieuwkerk. University of Texas Press, 2011.