Murray Forman

Murray Forman is Professor Emeritus of Media & Screen Studies at Northeastern University where his research encompassed media and culture with a primary focus on popular music, race, and age. For over thirty-five years he has engaged in research and writing about hip-hop culture, helping to forge the foundations of Hip-Hop Studies.

Murray is the author of The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (2002) and co-editor of three editions of That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004, 2011, 2023). In 2023, he co-edited Hip-Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production. He also wrote One Night on TV is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television (2012). A founding editor of Global Hip Hop Studies journal, Murray also serves as an editorial board member for numerous scholarly journals. He was a Research Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University (1998), a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow (2003-2004), and he was an inaugural recipient of the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship at the Marcyliena H. Morgan Hiphop Archive and Research Institute, Harvard University (2014-2015).

His most recent book, Old in the Game: Aging in and with Hip-Hop (2026), analyzes how hip-hop artists, audiences, and entrepreneurs negotiate the cultural processes of aging, examining the deeper meanings and values associated with growing old within a hip-hop sensibility. Addressing themes including generational difference and dissonance, ageism, memory and nostalgia, and the concepts of retirement and death, Old in the Game responds to the crucial questions, how are the culture’s oldest innovators aging in and with hip-hop and how is aging in hip-hop unique?