Farzaneh Hemmasi is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at University of Toronto. Her interests concern popular music, celebrity, transnational media publics, and the politics of popular culture. Her general research area is Iranian popular music, transnationality, media, and politics, and her publications cover topics including Iranian twentieth century "New Poetry" and popular music; the postrevolutionary political metaphorization of the Iranian female singing voice; and the Iranian expatriate cultural industries in Southern California.

Prof. Hemmasi received her doctorate, with distinction, from Columbia University in 2010 and has held fellowships with the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Humanities Forum and Columbia University’s Middle East Institute as well as its Institute of Social and Economic Policy and Research. Her publications have appeared in Ethnomusicology (2013), Mahoor Music Quarterly (2008), and the edited volume Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater: Artistic Developments in the Muslim World (University of Texas Press, 2011). In 2017 and 2018, four more publications will appear in the journals Popular Music, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Popular Communication, and the edited volume Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities (University of Hawaii Press). She is completing a book manuscript on Iranian popular music in Los Angeles.

At University of Toronto, Prof. Hemmasi was twice awarded research funding from the Connaught Foundation, for which she was profiled in the Connaught Edge Magazine (link). In 2015 she founded the Faculty of Music's first Iranian Music Ensemble, led by percussion virtuous Pedram Khavarzamini. In 2017, she organized the Jackman Humanities Institute-supported symposium and conference "Rhythms of Social Change: Time, Rhythm, & Pace in Performance." She is also a co-organizer of the cross-faculty JHI Working Group "Critical Approaches to Middle East Studies: Subjects, Culture, Political Formations." Prof. Hemmasi regularly presents her work at the meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the American Anthropological Association, and the International Society for Iranian Studies, among others.