A.D. Carson

A.D. Carson is an Associate Professor of Hip-Hop and a Shannon Center Fellow for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia. He from Decatur, Illinois, and his work deals with issues of race, place, history, literature, rhetorics & performance. He has written essays and music for “Rolling Stone,” “Washington Post,” “SPIN,” “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. He received the 2021 Research Award for Excellence in the Arts & Humanities from the University of Virginia after the release of his album, “i used to love to dream,” published with University of Michigan Press in 2020. The album won a Prose Award from the Association of American Publishers and was a finalist for the 2024 Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). It is the third in a series of mixtap/e/ssays that follow his doctoral dissertation album, “Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions.”

Upon release, “Owning My Masters” was recognized with the Outstanding Dissertation Award from Clemson. A mastered and peer-reviewed version of “Owning My Masters” will be published with University of Michigan Press in 2024.

Dr. Carson is also the author of “Being Dope: Hip-Hop & Theory through Mixtape Memoir,” forthcoming from the Theorizing African American Music Book Series by Oxford University Press.