The Charles Seeger Lecturer for the SEM 2017 Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado, is Dr. Scheherazade Qassim Hassan, who will speak on “The Social Space of Music Traditions in Baghdad Before and After Destruction.” Dr. Hassan has long been recognized as a leading scholar of the Arab world’s “popular arts” (al-funūn al-sha‘biyya). As an Assistant, then Associate, Professor at the University of Baghdad from 1967 to 1982, she founded and directed the first Centre for Traditional Music in Baghdad and created a sound archive based on extensive fieldwork in all regions of Iraq. More recently, she has taught at the University of Paris VIII-St. Denis and X-Nanterre, and she is currently a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London.

Dr. Hassan’s B.A. and M.A. in Historical Musicology at the Charles University of Prague, and her doctorate under Jacques Berque and Gilbert Rouget in Islamic Sociology and Ethnomusicology, respectively, at the University of Paris and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, laid a solid foundation for the interdisciplinary approaches she has developed as a researcher, writer, lecturer, teacher, and consultant. Her dissertation on The Musical Instruments of Iraq and their role in Traditional Society was first published in French, 1980, then substantially enlarged twelve years later for the Arabic edition. Like her other publications, which include an Arabic-language survey of Iraqi music, the dissertation does full justice to Iraq’s linguistic and religious diversity.

Dr. Hassan has carried out important fieldwork in many regions to the south and west of Iraq: Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, North and South Yemen, Egypt, and Tunisia. Her numerous activities as an organizer include chairing the ICTM Study Group for Music in the Arab World from 1990 to the present, organizing an important 1989 symposium on the 1932 Congress of Arab Music, and editing the symposium proceedings for publication. As a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and as a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University’s Middle East Research Center in Amman, she focused her work on the Iraqi maqām, drawing on over 200 hours of recorded interviews with practitioners and aficionados. Her forthcoming publications on the Iraqi maqām will add significantly to awareness of this rich tradition on the part of scholars and a broader public. She is active on the conference circuit and, as one of the rare ethnomusicologists who can lecture and write in three languages—Arabic, French, and English, does as much as one person could to foster communication among the scholarly worlds inhabited by speakers of those languages.

- Stephen Blum