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JOSH PILZER
SEIKA BOYE
FARZANEH HEMMASI

is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. Born in Vancouver, he grew up in Nashville, Tennessee as a popular musician. He earned his bachelor's degree at the Evergreen State College in Interdisciplinary Studies, and 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, and the relationships between music, 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,” and in both theoretical and analytical approaches to the thresholds which link music to other forms of social expression. 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. Since 2011, he has been doing summer and research-leave fieldwork for an ethnography of music and song among Korean survivors of the atomic bombing of Japan, which will be his second book project. 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 U of T he teaches graduate seminars on music and everyday life; the social poetics of music; music, culture, and health; the music anthropology of the imagination, and others.

Seika Boye is a dance artist and scholar. She has appeared as a  contemporary dancer with Ballet Creole, Judith Marcuse Projects, Electric   Company Theatre and various independent artists across Canada. Her work has been published in The Dance Current, Dance Collection, Danse Magazine, alt.theatre and The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (forthcoming). Seika has taught lecture and studio courses at York University and currently teaches movement for actors at the University of Toronto, where she is a PhD candidate in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. Her recent projects include: dramaturg and deviser for A Black Girl in Search of God (writer/director Djanet Sears); choreographer with Ars Mechanica for their upcoming project at the 2016 Hatch Series, Harbourfront Centre; and initiating/chairing The Other D: Locating Dance in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies in Canada Symposium in January 2016. Seika’s doctoral research on social dancing within Toronto’s black population at mid-century is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is Director of the newly established Centre for Dance Studies at The Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto. www.theotherd.ca

is an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, researching Iranian popular music, migration, media, and politics. She graduated from Columbia University in 2010 and has held fellowships with the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Humanities Forum, Columbia University’s Middle East Institute as well as its Institute of Social and Economic Policy and Research. Her publications have appeared in Ethnomusicology (January 2013), the edited volume Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater (U Texas 2011), and Mahoor Musical Quarterly (2008), and she has presented at a number of North American and international conferences. She has taught Ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Hunter College in the City University of New York. Farzaneh is currently writing a book that examines the intersection of popular music, affect, technological mediation, and politics in Iran and its diasporas from the 1960s to the present. In the fall of 2011, she began a  project documenting sound and musical practices associated with New York City’s Occupy Wall Street movement. 

KARYN RECOLLET
XING FAN
YUROU ZHONG

Karen Recollet's work is situated in the intersectional spaces of Indigenous performance, youth and diaspora, hip hop culture- specifically Indigenous hip hop feminism, and Indigenous new media. She is particularly interested in new Indigeneities produced in urban hub spaces as they shape solidarity movements and social activism. Her forthcoming book ‘We survived we row-walked an we learned to fly’: Hip Hop as Contemporary Urban Indigenous Thought’ explores Indigenous hip hop culture’s activism and socio/cultural critique, offering alter Indigeneities and manifesting Indigenous futurity.

Xing’s research interests include theatre and politics in the People’s Republic of China, Chinese dramatic literature, dramatic and performance theory in Asian theatre, and inter-cultural collaborations.  Xing has more than ten years of training in Beijing opera and Kun opera acting in China, and received intensive training in Beijing opera acting, Kabuki acting, and Gamelan ensemble in Hawai‘i.  She is a winner of the Award for Best Leading Female Role hosted by the Hawai‘i State Theatre Council for her performance in Nozaki Village, an English-language Kabuki production in 2004.  She became interested in Gamelan music in Hawai‘i, and played and danced with the Bates Gamelan from 2010 to 2014.  Xing is a winning author of the Emerging Scholars Award hosted by the Association for Asian Performance in 2013, and is currently composing a manuscript on Beijing opera model plays during China’s Cultural Revolution.  Xing is a recipient of the Connaught New Researcher Award in 2016.  She is serving as a re-elected Vice President of the Association for Asian Performance for 2016-2018.

Yurou Zhong received her PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University. Her research interests include modern Chinese literature and culture, writing systems and literacy, intersections between technology and writing, history of linguistic thought, and media theory. She is currently completing her first book based on her dissertation “Script Crisis and Literary Modernity in China, 1916-1958.”

POLINA DESSIATNITCHENKO
NATE RENNER
GABRIELA JIMÉNEZ

Polina Dessiatnitchenko is a sixth-year direct-entry PhD candidate who recently completed her fieldwork in Baku, Azerbaijan, as a W. Garfield Weston Fellow. Her dissertation project, which has been supported by the CGS-SSHRC doctoral scholarship, is about Azerbaijani mugham. Polina takes pleasure in cross-disciplinary work, and aims to incorporate theories from hermeneutic phenomenology, musical improvisation studies, narrative studies, discourse analysis, and postcolonial analysis, in order to understand most essential but complicated questions about the subjective experience of Azerbaijani mugham music. She also loves to play the tar while wearing Azerbaijani national costumes. She taught Ethnomusicology in the fall term of 2016-17 at Tufts University in Boston, MA.

Nate Renner's research concerns the contemporary and traditional music and dance of Japan's indigenous Ainu people. For years he studied relationships between music and everyday speech, which he believes are available to people in the formation and expression of identity. More recently — after one year of fieldwork with Ainu people in Hokkaido, Japan — Nate shifted his focus to include relationships between music and the physical environment. Some of the questions Nate ponders are: Can certain ontologies of music and ways of conceptualizing sound engender particular relationships with the environment? Can the music of contemporary indigenous peoples like the Ainu inform the institutions of colonial states on issues such as the environment, law, and politics? 

 Gabriela Jiménez is a doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto. She is completing a dissertation on the ways non-normatively gendered and sexually oriented persons version contemporary Mexico City through musical performances. She holds a BA in art history and French and Francophone Studies and a MA in Afro-American Studies, both from UCLA. Her research has been published in Black Music Research Journal.

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