Biography

A.D. Carson is an Associate Professor of Hip-Hop and a Shannon Center Fellow for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia. He is from Decatur, Illinois. His work as a performance artist, educator, writer, and commentator deals with issues of race, place, history, literature, hip-hop, rhetorics & performance. He has written essays and music for Rolling Stone, Washington Post, SPIN, Los Angeles Times, 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 by submitting the rap album, Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions as his doctoral dissertation.

Dr. Carson received the 2021 Research Award for Excellence in the Arts & Humanities from the University of Virginia after the release of his 2020 album, i used to love to dream, with University of Michigan Press. The historic release was the first-ever rap album peer-reviewed for publication with an academic press. i used to love to dream won a Prose Award (Best eProduct) from the Association of American Publishers and was a 2024 finalist for the Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award from the American Council of Learned Societies. It is the third in a series of mixtap/e/ssays that follow his doctoral dissertation album.

While he was a graduate student at Clemson University, Carson’s work with students, staff, faculty and community members, was recognized with a 2016 Martin Luther King, Jr. Award for Excellence in Service for the “See the Stripes” campaign, which takes its name from the poem featured on his dissertation album, and raised awareness of historic, entrenched racism at the university. Upon release, Owning My Masters was recognized with the Outstanding Dissertation Award from Clemson. A mastered and peer reviewed version of the album will be published by University of Michigan Press in 2024.

Dr. Carson has authored several books, including a novel, COLD, which hybridizes poetry, rap lyrics, and prose. His academic and artistic work has been featured by Complex, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Forbes, The Guardian, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, NPR’s All Things Considered, OkayPlayer, Quiddity International Literary Journal and Public-Radio Program, Time, USA Today, and XXL among others. His book, Being Dope: Hip-Hop & Theory through Mixtape Memoir, is forthcoming from the Theorizing African American Music Book Series by Oxford University Press. His most recent album, V: ILLICIT, and other projects are available to stream/download free from aydeethegreat.com.