J. Griffith Rollefson: Professor of Music at University College Cork, National University of Ireland

Visiting Professor J. Griffith Rollefson is Professor of Music at University College Cork, National University of Ireland and has served on the faculties of music at the University of Cambridge and UC Berkeley, where he also served as UC Chancellor’s Public Scholar.  His first book, Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality (University of Chicago Press, 2017), won the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Ruth Stone Book Award and his second book, Critical Excess: Watch the Throne and the New Gilded Age (University of Michigan Press, 2021), explores the Jay-Z and Kanye “luxury rap” album in all its prophetic contradiction.  Griff is founding co-editor (with University of Cape Town’s Adam Haupt) of the community-engaged open access journal Global Hip Hop Studies and from 2019 to 2024 was Principal Investigator of the €2m European Research Council initiative CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation, developing theory, methods, and digital infrastructure for the interdisciplinary field of hip hop studies.  His current projects are an open access multi-authored textbook titled, Planet Rap: Global Hip Hop and Postcolonial Perspectives; a monograph stemming from the ERC research titled, Hip Hop Interpellation: Intertextualities, Archetypes, and Gems of Knowledge in the Global Cipher; and a monograph titled, “The Big Pill”: Black Musical Metaphysics and Enlightenment Binaries, currently in development with University of Chicago Press.