Melissa Avdeeff

Melissa Avdeeff is currently Course Director for the Communication, Culture, and Media MA course at Coventry University, after joining the Media and Communications team as a Senior Lecturer in 2018. Previously held positions include Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Victoria, Lecturer at the University of Alberta, and having completed her doctoral studies at the University of Edinburgh.

In her transdisciplinary research and teaching practice, Melissa uses multimodal approaches to popular culture figures and digital and/or emerging technologies to empirically examine such areas as: social media and discourse analysis; AI and computational creativity; and critical approaches to digital media and technology. Her research blends sociological methods and cultural theory within discourse/content analysis, feminist methods, digital ethnography, and/or quantitative digital research methods.

Melissa is primarily interested in how people create meaning through music, from the listener perspective, and how it is mediated through digital and emerging technologies. Her work focuses on how this meaning circulates through discursive and embodied responses to popular music texts. Currently, her research agenda focuses on two applications of these themes: (1) popular music and technocultural critical discourse analysis on social media platforms; and (2) embodied futurisms, in regards to affective responses to AI popular music.

As someone who values the importance of academic community and collaboration, Melissa is involved in a number of roles to support the international community of popular music scholars. She is the communication coordinator for both the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) Canada branch, and the IASPM Journal, as well as serving on the editorial board for the IASPM Journal.

• Popular Music
• Digital Technologies & Society
• Computational Creativity
• Feminist Methods
• Critical Discourse Analysis
• Social Media 
• Mediation