BIOGRAPHY

Mary Fogarty is a cultural sociologist interested in performance, and she researches dance, music, and popular culture. At York University, she teaches graduate courses such as Advanced Research and Dissertation Seminar and undergraduate courses in dance education. Fogarty has written about transnational networks of Hip Hip dancers, music and sound in dance films, digital reconstructions of famous dance sequences in film, popular dance aesthetics, Hip Hop dance pedagogy, the global circulation of breaking and waacking/whacking practices and ideas, the sociology of body and dance, Hip Hop dance theatre, representations of gender in breaking performances, comparative judgment and pleasure in popular culture, aging and musical tastes, and back-up dancers in the entertainment industries. Her historically-grounded research about the development of breaking networks internationally appears in Continuum journal.

Her work appears in The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen, Ageing and Youth Cultures, and The Oxford Handbook of Punk Rock, as well as in numerous academic journals. Recent publications include a chapter about Toronto b-boys and b-girls’ formal contributions to breaking aesthetics in We Still Here: Hip Hop North of the 49th Parallel (Marsh and Campbell, 2020), and a chapter about dance fandom online in Beyoncé: At Work, On Screen, and Online (Iddon and Marshall, 2020). One of her long-term research projects on the rise of international breaking competitions and how they are judged/promoted has been published in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition (Dodds, 2019). She was also recently interviewed about waacking in The New York Times.

With degrees in music (PhD), popular culture (MA) and film studies (BA Honours), Professor Fogarty is an interdisciplinary scholar who centres her activities on collaborations with artists and advocacy for marginalized, underrepresented and devalued art practices in Higher Education and society. Fogarty is known for her advocacy of Hip Hop dance education in and outside of formal institutions over many years. She is a member of KeepRockinYou arts collective, founded by Judi Lopez, and the lead facilitator/lecturer of the Toronto B-Girl Movement. Her forthcoming project, The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies, with co-editor Dr. Imani Kai Johnson, features chapters from internationally recognized Hip Hop dancers, scholars, activists, and advocates. For this project, Fogarty wrote about gender and aging in breaking performances, as well as the influence of the Fly Girls with co-authors Leah “McFly-Waackeisha” McKesey and Diana “Fly Lady Di” Reyes, and the relationship between aerosol arts and breaking aesthetics with co-author Anthony “YNOT” DeNaro.

She has been an invited Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Hip Hop Education Center (2013-2015 and 2017-2018) and an invited keynote, guest speaker, and artist at numerous events and institutions.  At York University, she is cross-appointed with Theatre & Performance,  and Communication & Culture graduate degree programs.

Dr. Fogarty is currently the President of IASPM-Canada and Editor of IASPM Journal. She is a former Chair of PoP Moves Americas (2016-20).

She is currently co-editing a Special Issue with Jason Ng on Breaking and the Olympics for the Global Hip Hop Studies journal. Other ongoing projects involve co-authoring work with various collaborators including Kenneth “Ken Swift” Gabbert, Yarrow Lutz, Jason “J-Sun” Noer, and Francesca D’Amico-Cuthbert, and participating as a collaborator on community engaged projects led by Geoff Reyes and Joel Ong, respectively.

A list of her publications is available on her personal website at www.maryfogarty.ca