A.D. Carson

A.D. Carson is from Decatur, Illinois. He is an Associate Professor of Hip Hop and a Shannon Center Fellow for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia. His work as a rapper, educator, writer, and commentator deals with issues of race, place, history, literature, hip hop, rhetorics & performance.

Carson is the author of “Being Dope: Hip Hop & Theory through Mixtape Memoir,” “COLD,” and “The City.” His mixtape, “i used to love to dream,” was the first-ever rap album peer-reviewed for publication with an academic press. The project received a Prose Award (Best eProduct) from the Association of American Publishers and was a finalist for the Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Carson is the recipient of a Research Award for Excellence in the Arts & Humanities from the University of Virginia. He is a recipient of a Martin Luther King, Jr. Award for Excellence in Service from Clemson University and the Outstanding Dissertation Award for his album “Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions,” for which he earned a Ph.D. in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design.

Carson’s work has been published by The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Washington Post, SPIN, Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, NPR’s Code Switch, Bleacher Report, and Scalawag and has been featured by Complex, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Forbes, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, NPR’s All Things Considered, OkayPlayer, Time, USA Today, and XXL. His recent audio projects, including “Owning My Masters (Mastered)” and “V: ILLICIT,” are available to stream/download free online.