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 ethnographic research project on music, sound, affordability in Toronto’s Kensington Market neighbourhood. She also received Inaugeral winner of the Hamid Naficy Book Award. She also serves on the advisory boards for San Francisco State University’s Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies and Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of Toronto. For more information on her teaching and research, see Prof. Hemmasi’s personal website.
Jeff Packman is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology, and Associate Dean of Graduate Education. He developed his interest in Brazilian music while a free-lance drummer in Los Angeles performing and recording with various rock, jazz, blues, and “Latin” fusion artists. It was also during this period that he first heard the term “ethnomusicology” — a discovery that inspired him to pursue his MA (2001) with Deborah Wong and René Lysloff at the University of California, Riverside, and the PhD (2007) at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied with Bonnie Wade, Ben Brinner, and Jocelyne Guilbault. His book, Living from Music in Salvador: Professional Musicians and the Capital of Afro-Brazil (Wesleyan University Press 2021) is an ethnographic study of music as labour and musicians as labourers in a city that is profoundly informed by legacies of colonization, the African slave trade, and the plantation system and reliant on the commodification of Afro-diasporic expressive culture. Jeff has published articles on various aspects of music and dance in Bahia, Brazil in journals including Black Music Research Journal, Ethnomusicology, and Latin American Music Review as well as various edited collections. Several of these publications explore different manifestations of samba de roda, an Afro-diasporic music and dance complex from Bahia. The fieldwork for the samba de roda project, which was supported by a multi-year grant from SSHRC, was done in collaboration with two dance researchers and a Brazilian ethnomusicologist. Closer to home, Jeff contributed a chapter to the Cambridge Guide to Percussionon the relationship between drum set performance and changing technologies. Most recently, he has begun another SSHRC supported project in Bahia that pursues a historical and ethnographic mapping of a month-long series of celebrations known as thefestas juninas.
Joshua D. Pilzer is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology. Born in Vancouver, he grew up in Nashville, Tennessee as an(un)popular musician. He earned his bachelor’s degree at the Evergreen State College in interdisciplinary studies, and graduate degrees in ethnomusicology from the University of Hawai’i (MA) and the University of Chicago (PhD). His research focuses on the anthropology of music in modern Korea and Japan, voice studies, and the relationships between music, everyday life, survival, memory, traumatic experience, marginalization, socialization, gendered violence, public culture, mass media, social practice, and identity. He is particularly interested in the ethnography of the “everyday,” in theoretical and analytical approaches to the thresholds which link music to other forms of social expression, and in the vistas of ethnomusicology beyond music. His first book, Hearts of Pine, about singing in the lives of Korean survivors of the Japanese “comfort women” system, was published in 2012 by Oxford University Press. He is in the process of publishing his second book manuscript, based on fieldwork since 2011, on the voice and the arts among Korean survivors of the atomic bombing of Japan. He is also conducting fieldwork for an ethnography of the voice in everyday life in contemporary Japan, focused on the uses of speaking and singing voices in pedagogies of propriety, authority, and legitimate violence. He has published articles in Ethnomusicology, Dongyang Umak Yeonggu, and The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). At the University of Toronto he teaches graduate seminars on music and everyday life, the ethnomusicology of voice, the social poetics of music, music in East Asian modernities, and the music anthropology of the imagination, among others.
Professors Emeriti
James Kippen is Professor Emeritus of Ethnomusicology. He taught ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto from 1990 to 2019, and was largely responsible for the growth of the discipline at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music. Born and raised in London, England, he studied under the pianist and conductor David Parry. He developed an interest in Hindustani music and Javanese gamelan at the University of York (UK) under Neil Sorrell, and pursued a doctorate in social anthropology and ethnomusicology at the Queen’s University of Belfast under John Baily and John Blacking. He is the author of The Tabla of Lucknow (CUP 1988). He held three major SSHRC research grants to explore issues related to rhythm and metre in Hindustani music: he has translated and analysed several indigenous works from the 18th to early 20th centuries, projects that led to several articles as well as the book Gurudev’s Drumming Legacy: Music, Theory and Nationalism in the Mrdang aur Tabla Vadanpaddhati of Gurudev Patwardhan (Ashgate 2006). He has contributed key articles to the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music as well as a chapter in the popular textbook on ethnographic method,Shadows in the Field (OUP 2008). He is the co-editor of Music, Dance and the Art of Seduction (Eburon 2013). He continues to play both tabla and pakhavaj drums, and is an enthusiastic Balinese gendèr player with the ensemble Seka Rat Nadi.
