13 May Peer-Reviewed Rap Album Wins Research Award
Award for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities
A.D. Carson, College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
A.D. Carson’s mixtape/essay, “i used to love to dream,” released in 2020 by the University of Michigan Press, was the first peer-reviewed rap album, and was published with an academic publisher.
Carson meets the challenge of offering hip-hop composition and production as academic knowledge-making practice and scholarly inquiry, as well as personal reflection. His public-facing hip-hop scholarship (music and prose) confronts and changes the politics of knowledge production that often treat hip-hop producers as secondary or tertiary, rather than primary, contributors to academic discourse in and around the field.
“By rejecting the proposition that hip-hop music requires translation to make it suitable for an academic context, Carson offers us a new paradigm for scholarly work in which musical Blackness is not reduced to metaphor but remains a salient part of the intellectual and artistic encounter,” said Loren Kajikawa, chair of the music program at The George Washington University.
Read the article from UVA Today.
“i used to love to dream” is also a Category Winner (Best eProduct) of a 2021 Prose Award from the Association of American Publishers.
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