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Laura McLaren

Musicology

Biography

Laura McLaren is a PhD candidate in musicology at the University of Toronto. Her research interests are in popular music, spirituality, feminist theory, music video, and digital media. She completed her Master of Arts at the University of Ottawa. Her current doctoral research, supported by a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, uses a postsecular lens to examine the inclusion of religious and spiritual elements in the music and lyrics of mainstream popular songs from the 2010s. She has presented her research at IASPM-CAN and has contributed a chapter to The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis (2019), as well as co-authored chapters in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production (2020) and YouTube and Music: Online Culture and Everyday Life (2023).