Campus Directory

Division Arts Division

Department/College/Unit Music Department

Title PhD candidate
Teaching Fellow

Affiliation Graduate

Areas of Expertise Folk Music
Music
Nationalism
Asian Music
Diversity
Ethnomusicology
Middle Eastern Music
Personal and Social Identities

Mail Stop Music Center

Biography, Education and Training

Shireen is a Canadian-American-Iranian PhD Candidate and Teaching Fellow in Cross-Cultural Musicology at UCSC. She earned her BA at University of British Columbia in Interdiscipinary Studies (2006), an Associate's Degree in Violin and Classical Voice from Vancouver Community College (2019), and a Master of Arts from UCSC (2022). Shireen completed the UCSC Teaching and Learning Center's Graduate Pedagogy Fellowship program which recognizes leadership in utilizing and promoting effective and equitable teaching strategies in higher-education classrooms.

In the gap between her undergrad and her serious commitment in music and research, she sailed between Alaska and the Sea of Cortez, managed a graphic and web design company, renovated several character houses in Vancouver, and apprenticed as an electrician. Shireen has played and performed music from the Balkans and Türkiye as vocalist and violinist since 2010 with various groups from Vancouver and the Bay Area and has performed around the North American West coast, Albania, and Türkiye.

Summary of Expertise

Dissertation summary:

My dissertation (in process) investigates the ways in which anti-nationalist ideologies inform the aesthetics of transmission, leisure, and devotion at contemporary summer music workshops that instruct traditional music from the Balkan, Ottoman, and Persianate cultural spheres, including several minority musical traditions that have often been altered or minimized through folklorization to advance ethnonationalist agendas that harm minority populations. My dissertation argues that intensive, sustained social contact, combined with a participatory ethos, make the summer music camps in question contemporary, cosmopolitan iterations of meşk (originally an Ottoman Turkish term referring to a master-apprentice relationship in music education imbued with values of devotion and love). In this context, meşk becomes a generative framework for examining how not only music, but also ideologies, are transmitted in the friendly, informal, and often beautiful natural setting of a summer music workshop. Participants associate the repertoire learned and practiced at music workshops not only with its musico-cultural origins but with the social dynamics they experience, such as joy and love. I argue that the affective recontextualization of traditional music that occurs in these settings links contemporary liberal, pluralistic values with a variety of musical lineages that have historically either developed or suffered under the specter of ethnonationalism, imbuing repertoire with new symbolic meaning relevant to participants’ and instructors’ personal concerns from both outsider and insider perspectives regarding minority positionality in these cultural spheres. Thus, summer music workshops play an unspoken but deeply felt role in broader folk music revival conversations and in antiracist and human rights advocacy.

Qualifying exam summary:

In April 2023, I passed my qualifying exams with honors. My three exam topics were: Music and Nationalism in Türkiye, Iran, and South Asia; Romani Musical Practices in Eastern Europe and Anatolia; and Traditional Music of Cultural Groups from the former Ottoman Ecumene and Persianate Cultural Sphere. Together, my qualifying exam essays address the ways in which minority musics have been politicized for nationalist projects in specific geo-political contexts, how legacies of these twentieth century actions play out in today’s global music industry, and the practical effects of such legacies on musicians’ livelihoods, opportunities, and reception in performance, recording, and educational contexts.

Master's thesis summary:

My master's thesis is an ethnography of the online Persian and Central Asian dance school, Pomegranate Garden Dance, which Natalie Nayun founded in 2020 as a way of bringing a global dance community together and creating employment for dance teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. My thesis reviews the history of Persian dance and examines how dance teachers today define and teach Persian dance despite the lack of standardization as well as how students respond to online dance instruction during a pandemic.

Research Interests

• Summer music workshops
• Folk music revival and regeneration
• Participatory music-making
• Amateur musicianship
• Meşk
• Cross-cultural music pedagogy
• Music and love
• Music, politics, and nationalism
• Music and conflict
• Music and affect
• Balkan musical traditions
• Anatolian musical traditions
• Romani musical traditions  in Southeastern Europe and Western Türkiye
• Iranian musical traditions

Teaching Interests

• Music of the Silk Road
• Pedagogy of Music
• Global Pop
• Intro to World Music
• Music of the Balkans
• Music of Türkiye
• Slavic and Turkish singalong

Awards, Honors and Grants

2023 Arts Dean’s Fund for Excellence, UCSC
2022 American Research Institute in Turkey Summer Fellowship sponsored by
Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad
2022 Arts Dean’s Fund for Excellence, UCSC
2022 Graduate Pedagogy Fellowship, Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning,
UCSC
2020 FLAS, Indiana University, Bloomington – Center for Islamic Studies
2020 Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies grant for summer language
studies, UCSC
2020 Music department travel grant for summer language studies, UCSC
2020 Regent’s Fellowship, UCSC
2019 Summer Language Institute Scholarship for Turkish, University of Pittsburgh
2018 John Young Scholarship for intellectual excellence, Vancouver Community College
2018 Summer Academy Scholarship, Vancouver Inter-Cultural Orchestra (VICO)
2015, 2018 Kef Scholarship, East European Folklife Center (EEFC)
2002 UBC Frank de Bruyn Memorial Debating Prize, University of British Columbia

Selected Publications

Nabatian, Shireen. 2023. “Persian and Central Asian Dance Online in the Era of COVID-19: The Interpretations and Refusals of Pomegranate Garden Dance.” In Dance in the Persianate World: History, Aesthetics, Performance, edited by Anthony Shay, 344—386. Performing Arts Series 14. Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers.

Courses Pedagogy of Music, Music of the Silk Road