Faculty Research Fellow
Farzaneh Hemmasi (Ph.D. Musicology, Columbia University, 2010) 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. Prof. Hemmasi’s other publications consider the circulation of political music and poetry between diaspora and homeland; the post-revolutionary political metaphorization of the Iranian female singing voice; and Iranian twentieth century “New Poetry” and popular music. 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, and noise in Toronto’s Kensington Market neighbourhood.
Fellowship Research Project—Sound, Community, and Tolerance in Toronto’s Kensington Market
My project is the creation of a website sharing the multimodal outcomes of a community engaged ethnographic research project called the Kensington Market Soundscape Study on the perceived increase of sound and noise in a downtown Toronto neighborhood’s public realm since March 2020, the beginning of the global Covid-19 pandemic. The multi-faceted website will include sonic and visual documentation of KM community members accounts of their experiences with neighbourhood sound and annotated, neighbourhood soundscape recordings in online maps of Kensington Market.