Education

PhD (University of Edinburgh)

Biography

Mary Fogarty is an Associate Professor of Dance whose interdisciplinary research bridges hip hop dance studies, popular music and sound studies, cultural sociology, ethnography, and performance studies. Her work examines movement cultures through questions of music, taste, media, and social history, with a particular focus on Black diasporic dance practices, techniques and mediations.

Fogarty is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies (with Imani Kai Johnson) and Movies, Moves, and Music: The Sonic World of Dance Films (with Mark Evans). She also co-edited the special issue “Taking Taylor Seriously” for Contemporary Music Review with Gina Arnold. Her scholarship appears in publications including That’s The Joint! The Hip Hop Studies Reader (third edition), the Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen, The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music, Hip-Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production, We Still Here: Hip Hop North of the 49th Parallel, The Oxford Handbook of Dance Competition, and The Oxford Handbook of Punk Rock. She served as Editor of IASPM Journal, and serves on the editorial boards of Global Hip Hop Studies, DIY, Alternative Cultures and Society,and the advisory board of IASPM. She served as President of IASPM-Canada, and Chair of Pop Moves Americas.

A long-time member of the KeepRockinYou collective, which organized the Toronto B-Girl Movement, Fogarty has performed, taught, choreographed, and adjudicated internationally across Canada, the United States, Europe, and Australia. She has served as a judge at major international dance competitions, including Olympic qualifying events. Her choreographic work includes SoundCheck, a collaboration with La Clem that premiered in 2024. With Jason Ng, she co-edited a double special issue on Breaking and the Olympics for Global Hip Hop Studies.

Fogarty has been an invited scholar and speaker at institutions and venues including New York University, the Centre national de la danse, Sadler's Wells, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, University of Southern California, Casa da Música, and universities and festivals across Europe, North America, and Australia. Her research and commentary on dance, music and popular culture have also appeared in outlets including The New York Times, Time magazine, The Washington Post, and CBC.

Her current research projects explore somatics, social histories of posture, emotion and introversion in streetdance crews via ethnographic fieldwork, and robot dancing, including the Cold War sonic aesthetics and Black diasporic lineages that shape these movement practices and public reception.