A.D. Carson is an associate professor of hip-hop and the global South in the University of Virginia’s McIntire Department of Music and a Shannon Center Fellow for Advanced Studies.
A member of the UVA faculty since 2017, Carson founded the UVA Rap Lab, a “collaborative hip-hop cypher space” and classroom where students are encouraged to explore their experiences and thoughts through the medium of creating music.
Carson’s latest book, Being Dope: Hip-Hop and Theory through Mixtape Memoir, explores the throughline between rap music and America’s history of enslavement and criminalization of Black people…