Student's Amazing Hip-Hop Dissertation Earns Him A Teaching Job At University Of Virginia

A Clemson University student’s innovative dissertation using hip-hop music has landed him his first job – as an assistant professor.

Last month, student A.D. Carson hit the headlines due to his 34-track dissertation called “Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions.”
The album/dissertation pieced together history, literature, and art as Carson earned his Ph.D. in rhetorics, communication, and information design.
Songs from Carson’s dissertation went viral, and faculty members at the University of Virginia were listening.
In fact, the staff was so impressed, they contacted Carson to work at UVA’s McIntire Department of Music, as an Assistant Professor of Hip-Hop and the Global South.

“Hip-Hop is arguably the most important and of-the-moment form of popular music worldwide. We were looking to fill a space in our department that our students had expressed a lot of interest in.” –  Associate Professor Ted Coffey.

“We had a lot of excellent candidates, but we were really excited about what A.D. could add to all three of our department’s focus areas: scholarship, composition, and performance,” Professor Coffey said.
Starting in the spring, Dr. A.D. Carson will teach three different classes: two about writing and another called “The Black Voice,” which explores the expression and repression of black voices historically, in America.
“There might be people who refuse it as a serious course of study, but when they do that, I think they are reproducing, on some level, the problem that we have going on all across the country, of favoring certain voices over others,” Dr. A.D. Carson said.