Recent Royal Holloway PhD music graduate, Dr Shanika Ranasinghe, featured in a long segment on BBC Radio Wales with Lynn Bowles, talking about her doctoral research on fans of the Swedish pop group ABBA.

ABBA Voyage

Shanika reflected on her own fandom and favourite ABBA songs; she also talked about what makes ABBA's music resonate with the general public and how their songs discuss some unusual themes not often found in pop music, e.g. child custody arrangements. 

Shanika has frequently appeared on domestic and international TV and radio since 2016. She also recently published a book chapter on nostalgia and notions of home in ABBA songs, in the volume Nostalgia, Song and the Quest for Home: Production, Text, Reception (September 2025). Her PhD thesis, supervised by Dr Tim Summers, was a ten-year ethnographic project, looking at the journey ABBA fans undertook between the end of 1982 (when ABBA said they were going on a 'short break') and April 2018, when ABBA announced that they would be releasing two new songs. 

Catch up

You can hear the interview now on BBC Sounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002kc7n (time stamp: 16 mins 55 seconds)

Further research

For further reading and information about Dr Shanika Ranasinghe's research, please visit this collected essays, Nostalgia, Song and the Quest for Home: Production, Text, Reception: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/nostalgia-song-and-the-quest-for-home-9798765124338/