A.D. Carson

I’m from Decatur, Illinois, and I work as an Associate Professor of Hip Hop and a Shannon Center Fellow for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia. My work as a rapper, educator, writer, and commentator deals with race, place, history, literature, hip hop, rhetorics & performance.

My books include “Being Dope: Hip Hop & Theory through Mixtape Memoir,” “COLD,” and “The City.” My mixtape, “i used to love to dream,” was the first-ever rap album peer-reviewed for publication with an academic press. It 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.

I earned a Ph.D. from Clemson University in 2017 in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design by recording the album “Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions.” The album earned the university’s Outstanding Dissertation Award.

My 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. My recent audio projects, including “Owning My Masters (Mastered)” and “V: ILLICIT,” are available to stream/download free from aydeethegreat.com.