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Norma Coates elected president of the IASPM-US
April 2021
Associate professor Norma Coates has been elected president of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music – U.S. Chapter (IASPM-US). Professor Coates, who is jointly appointed to the Faculty of Information & Media Studies and the Don Wright Faculty of Music at Western, begins her two-year term as president in May 2021.
IASPM-US is an interdisciplinary and interprofessional organization that represents the United States branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. Through its annual meetings, its quarterly publication (the Journal of Popular Music Studies), and its website, IASPM-US promotes a range of approaches (scholarly or otherwise) to the study of popular music. Professor Coates has a number of priorities in mind that she’d like to address in her new role.
“My goals during the term are to improve equity within the organization, especially its leadership, while formalizing mentorship for junior colleagues, helping to recruit and then work with new co-editors for our journal, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and planning and organizing our next two conferences.”
Coates' research interests include popular music and identity, and historical popular music television. Her journal and anthologized articles on both topics circulate and are taught internationally. Between 2010 and 2019, Coates supervised or co-supervised 10 master’s level Popular Music and Culture students as they successfully completed their program requirements. She also teaches in the undergraduate Media, Information & Technoculture program, having most recently taught MIT 1050 – Navigating our Media Landscape: #mediaculture during the Winter 2021 term.
She first attended an IASPM-US meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 23 years ago while she was at graduate school. Since then, Coates has served in several executive and committee chair roles and was also an associate editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies in the mid-2000s.
