April 24, 2026 | 3:30PM
Fulton Recital Hall, Goodspeed Hall, 4th floor
Being Dope: Hip Hop & Theory through Mixtape Memoir
A.D. Carson
Associate Professor of Hip-Hop and Shannon Center Fellow for Advanced Studies, University of Virginia
A.D. Carson is an Associate Professor of Hip-Hop and a Shannon Center Fellow for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia. He is from Decatur, Illinois. His work as a performance artist, educator, writer, and commentator deals with issues of race, place, history, literature, hip-hop, rhetorics & performance. He has written essays and music for Rolling Stone, Washington Post, SPIN, Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, NPR’s Code Switch, Bleacher Report, Scalawag, and a number of other outlets.
Dr. Carson is suspicious of academia and academics, but he earned a Ph.D. in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design at Clemson University in 2017 by submitting the rap album, Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions as his doctoral dissertation. He has authored several books, including a novel, COLD, which hybridizes poetry, rap lyrics, and prose. His academic and artistic work has been featured by Complex, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Forbes, The Guardian, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, NPR’s All Things Considered, OkayPlayer, Quiddity International Literary Journal and Public-Radio Program, Time, USA Today, and XXL among others. His book, Being Dope: Hip-Hop & Theory through Mixtape Memoir, is forthcoming from the Theorizing African American Music Book Series by