Mary Fogarty is an Associate Professor of Dance at York University (Toronto) although her PhD was awarded by a music department (Edinburgh University). She did her MA in Popular Culture and a BA (Honours) in Film Studies. All the way through her graduate studies she researched breaking, the original dance of Hip-Hop culture. Her first academic appointment was as Lecturer at the University of East London where she taught for two years while finishing her dissertation before heading back to Canada in 2011 to begin her current job. (She is on sabbatical for the academic year 2017-2018). Recently, Mary co-edited Movies, Moves and Music: The Sonic World of Dance Films (2016). She also has chapters in The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music (2015), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen (2014), and Ageing and Youth Cultures: Music, Style and Identity (2012). Her current academic projects include a collaborative book project with Ken Swift, one of the most influential B-Boys on the planet, and she is co-editing The [Oxford] Handbook of Hip-Hop Dance Studies (forthcoming) that includes chapters by dance practitioners as well as academics. She is currently the North American Chair of PoP Moves, a research group that began in the UK devoted to the study of popular dance that she helped to co-found, and has recently joined the editorial board of the IASPM journal. As a B-Girl, she is a member of KeepRockinYou, a community-focused arts collective that has organized five seasons of the Toronto B-Girl Movement, an educational program for the empowerment of females in Hip-Hop culture.
Dr. Mary Fogarty
Associate Professor / Canada