16 May 2017 6pm - 8pm

Join us on Tuesday 16th May at 6.30pm for a conversation between Farzaneh Hemmasi and Leila Pourtavaf responding to our current exhibition Jumana Manna’s A Magical Substance Flows Into Me.

Farzaneh Hemmasi is an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto. Her research interests span popular music, celebrity, transnational media publics, and the politics of popular culture, particularly in the Iran, the larger Middle East, and North America. She has held fellowships with the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum and Columbia University’s Middle East Institute. Her publications have appeared in Ethnomusicology (2013), Mahoor Music Quarterly (2008), and the edited volume Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater (University of Texas Press, 2011). Farzaneh is currently writing a book on the “Tehrangeles” Iranian expatriate music industry in Los Angeles.

Leila Pourtavaf is a Toronto-based writer, educator, curator and doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. She is a co-editor of the publication The Bookmobile Book (2015) which chronicles the project’s five year history, and the editor of Féminismes Électriques (2012), a bilingual collection of essays which reflect on a decade of feminist art production. Her current research focusses on visual and textual representations, as well as archival traces of a late 19th century Persian harem.