Royal Anthropological Institute 2026 John Blacking Lecture and Inaugural Professorial Lecture

Speaker

Laudan Nooshin is Professor of Music at City St George’s, University London, where she has taught since 2004. She completed her PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London, and taught there and at Brunel University before moving to City.

Laudan’s research interests include contemporary music and youth culture in Iran, music and sound in Iranian cinema, urban sound studies, and sound and equity in public space with a focus on museums and heritage spaces.

Laudan has published widely and is currently writing a book on the sounds of Tehran. In 2023-24, she was seconded to the theatre and acoustic consultancy Charcoalblue (AHRC funded) and is currently in receipt of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship for a project exploring the musical and cultural lives of Polish exile-refugees in Iran during World War 2.

The lecture will commence at 17:00 till 18:30, followed by a reception.

Lecture abstract

Building Bridges, Making a Difference: Reflections on Music Scholar as Cultural Mediator

For much of my academic career, I have sought to contest polarising and excluding binaries and to build bridges, including between different areas of music study and across cultural divides. My PhD dissertation challenged the orientalising binaries between so-called ‘composition’ and ‘improvisation’, in part inspired by the writings of John Blacking.

I later went on to research and write about popular musicians in Iran whose work was rarely heard about in academia outside Iran at that time. More recently, from the mid-2010s, I became involved in work aimed at creating a more equitable and diverse Music Higher Education sector in the UK.

All of this led increasingly to a desire to work beyond the confines of academia and to find new audiences in contexts where my research would make a real difference, particularly in promoting greater understanding of Iranian culture in the UK.

My personal background as British-born with Iranian heritage no doubt had an impact, since from a young age I often found myself in the role of cultural mediator or translator, particularly given widespread negative media representations in which Iranians are often dehumanised and ‘othered’.

Whilst the idea of applied scholarship is nothing new, in the context of divisive international politics it becomes crucially important to work to counter such dehumanising narratives.

In this lecture, I will reflect on almost 20 years of applied work, focusing on a number of projects, including an educational trip to Iran (2008), a project with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (2011-12), a children’s book project (2018-19), a project using sound in a historic house to draw attention to subaltern and lesser heard voices (2022), and my current Leverhulme Trust funded project on Polish Refugees in Iran during World War 2. I consider the value of this work and discuss how, of all the activities during my almost 40 years in academia, it is these that I have found most satisfying and meaningful.