At the beginning of June, Laudan travelled to Oslo, Norway, as an invited speak at a symposium held as part of a 5-year project funded by the Norwegian Research Council on ‘Popular Music and Gender in Transnational Contexts’, led by Professor Stan Hawkins.
Laudan’s paper was entitled ‘Sites of Memory: Public Emotionality, Gender and Nationhood in the Music of Googoosh’, and explored the music of Iran’s pop diva Googoosh and its role for Iranian diasopra communities in Europe and the US.
The other invited speaker was sociologist and popular music scholar Professor Antoine Hennion, from the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, Paris, whose  paper was entitled: ‘Performativity, Performance and Musical Genres’.
More information on the symposium and on the project:
http://www.hf.uio.no/imv/english/research/projects/musicandgender/index.html
