teaching & research
Candace Hansen is a PHD Candidate at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music
Hansen holds an Associate’s degree in Women’s Studies from Santa Ana College, dual Bachelor’s degrees in History and Gender Studies from UCLA, and a Masters of Art in Musicology from UCLA.
A former community organizer, Hansen has organized events at UCLA for the Center for Musical Humanities such as Curating Resistance: Punk as Archival Method conference and the lecture series Hear/Now/Then/There: Subversion, Sound, and the Queer Underground. Hansen is passionate about accessible and equitable pedagogy, and works to create lesson plans that engage multiple types of learners as both a TA and a professor. As a Gender Studies concentrator Hansen has developed and taught courses that think through queer punk as a method, on contemporary LGBTQ+ literature, and lesbian and trans narratives and critiques in film and television, and on the history of queer and trans underground art, music, and drag in the US.
Hansen’s dissertation is focused on dissonant drumming and queer and trans punk as an act of critical becoming through feeling. They are interested in how queer punk music embodies queer time and hails listeners through it, creating spaces for transformation, connection, critique, and hope at multiple scales. In his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Esteban Muñoz wrote that queer art and aesthetic practices “contain the blueprints, the schemata, of a forward dawning futurity.” Inspired by Muñoz, Hansen is interested in the affective elements of queer music that hold those blueprints, that transmit and transmute through feeling, invoking the not-yet-conscious while embodying maps to queer utopias. Hansen’s work bridges musicology, gender studies, LGBTQ studies, history, media studies, and performance studies.
Hansen has received the James and Sylvia Thayer Library Special Collections Research Fellowship, Center for the Study of Women / Streisand Center Travel Grant, UCLA Musicology best teacher award in 2022, the Carolyn D Smith Graduate Scholarship, and is a Cota Robles scholar.
