A.D. Carson

A.D. Carson is from Decatur, Illinois, and he works as 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 race, place, history, literature, hip hop, rhetorics & performance. 

His books include 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. 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.

Carson 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. He received a Martin Luther King, Jr. Award for Excellence in Service from Clemson University, and he is also the recipient of the Research Award for Excellence in the Arts & Humanities from the University of Virginia.

 His 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 from aydeethegreat.com.